Is Julie Annie cratering in?

From The New York Post:

May 4, 2007 -- FOLLOWING the first GOP presidential candidate debate last night, front-runner Rudy Giuliani may not be the front-runner much longer.

While he ended the night on a strong note - saying that a Hillary Clinton presidency would put us "back on defense" in the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism - for the most part, his debate performance was lousy.

Worse still for him, he was a disaster talking about the very issue he needs to speak most artfully about.

That issue, of course, is abortion.

Moderator Chris Matthews tossed Rudy and the other candidates a softball when he asked what his response would be if he were told that Roe vs. Wade - the 1973 Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right - had been overturned. Roe vs. Wade is a constitutional travesty. You don't have to be pro-life to believe this.

Cass Sunstein, who is on everybody's short list to be a Supreme Court justice in a Democratic administration, has said flatly that "Roe was way overreached."

All Rudy had to say was that he would believe a constitutional travesty had been overturned and therefore that it would be good day for America. This was a no-brainer. Instead, he offered an answer that was both intellectually indefensible and politically dense.

"It would be OK to repeal it," Rudy said, then quickly added, "It would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent" - the only candidate to say it would be OK. Meaning that he wouldn't mind if Roe were upheld just so long as a conservative justice upheld it. This makes no sense.

You either believe a Supreme Court decision should be overturned or you don't. You can't have it both ways. . .

If I were an investigative reporter I would be looking very hard into Julie Annie's background to see if maybe he hasn't actually paid for an abortion.

As the Post's editorial writer noted you can be 100% pro-choice and still have the intellectual honesty to admit that Roe vs. Wade was incorrectly decided. The fact that Rudy seems incapable of leveling any criticism whatsoever at the idea of absolute unrestricted abortion on demand during the entire course of the pregnancy seriously causes me to wonder if there isn't the skeleton of a dismembered fetus in his closet.

Perhaps he fears that some news organization has a 20 year-0ld receipt from some "family planning" clinic in the Bronx or Jersey with his credit card information on it and that they are just waiting for him to go "pro-life" so that they can impale him on a charge of hypocrisy.


UPDATE:

John Tabin, writing in the American Spectator, also feels that Julie Annie lost the debate on the strength of his answer to the abortion question.