What Giuliani Needs to Do

Fred Barnes, in an article in The Weekly Standard, says Rudy Giuliani needs to demonstrate to social conservatives that he's committed to an anti-abortion posture when he speaks to the Values Voter Summit in Washington next weekend.

Polls have shown that more than a quarter of Republicans would vote for a third-party candidate who has the support of social conservative leaders if Giuliani is the Republican nominee.

Some social conservative leaders, like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Gary Bauer of American Values, are speaking unfavorably about Giuliani's social conservative credentials and his efforts to score points with social conservatives, such as his pledge to appoint "strict constructionist" justices to the Supreme Court.

As Barnes points out, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but enough people voted for Ralph Nader in Florida to deprive Gore of that state's electoral votes -- and, thus, swung the state and the election to George W. Bush (with the help of the mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court).

A mass defection on the scale that polls are suggesting almost certainly would doom Giuliani in the general election, Barnes says.

It's a reasonable argument. But I think there's another question that social conservatives who have supported the Republican Party need to ask themselves.

The Republican Party has had an anti-abortion plank in its platform since 1980. In nearly 28 years, we've had 7 presidential elections, and Republicans have won 5 of them. Republicans controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987, and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress from 1995 to 2007.

With all those Republican office-holders -- who, apparently, owed their elections in part to the anti-abortion movement -- why has nothing been done on this issue?

That's not something that can be blamed on Giuliani.

Even if social conservatives defect to support a pro-life candidate, they've already had all the cards on their side for many years -- and nothing has been done.

What else did they need?