Strategy may doom former New York mayor�s nomination
From Andrew Purcell in New York

Rudy Giuliani will set out on a three-day bus tour of Florida this morning to reassure supporters that his "late state strategy" can still win him the Republican nomination. The former mayor of New York finished sixth in the Iowa caucus and fourth in the New Hampshire primary.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that a dozen senior members of his staff are waiving their January pay cheques, suggesting that he may be struggling to raise the funds required to mount a credible national campaign.

Giuliani has been leading the polls in Florida, California, New Jersey and New York for months, but his numbers are slipping, as Mike Huckabee and John McCain reap the dividends of their victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. Few outside his campaign believe the plan to concentrate on delegate-rich states in the second tier of primaries stands any chance of success.

Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio told politics website the Huffington Post "there is one very good word to describe Rudy's late state strategy: implausible". This was before Giuliani's poor showing in Iowa, where he finished behind Ron Paul, so rank an outsider that Fox News excluded him from its most recent Republican debate.

In New Hampshire, Giuliani invested more than $3 million in TV advertising, but ended up thanking his supporters and boarding a plane to Florida before all the votes had even been counted. "It is a wide-open race," he told them. "There's going to be a lot more ups and downs to it. And one thing we can handle is ups and downs. We are very good at that. That's what it means to handle crisis. And maybe we've lulled our opponents into a false sense of confidence now, right?" His crowd laughed, nervously.

Giuliani is banking on Florida, which unlike the early contests is a winner-takes-all primary. Mitt Romney, thanks to a low-key win in Wyoming and two second place finishes, leads the Republican field with 30 delegates. Florida is worth 57 delegates in a single shot.

If Giuliani can prevail there on January 29, he will also get a surge of momentum into "Mega Tuesday" on February 5, when half the country goes to the polls, including New York. Should his game plan work, it would be an unprecedented feat. No Republican candidate has become the party's nominee without winning either of the first two states.

Mayor of New York is historically a shaky platform from which to launch a bid for national office. Mayor John Lindsay famously called the presidency "the second-toughest job in America" in his doomed 1972 campaign. The problem for Republicans is the huge gulf between the conservative beliefs of the party base and the city's liberal attitude to abortion, gun rights and gay marriage.

As mayor, Giuliani applied strict licensing rules for handguns and backed federal legislation banning semi-automatic weapons. As a presidential candidate, he is "a strong supporter of the Second Amendment" right to bear arms.

In the 1990s, he presided over the abortion capital of America and donated $900 of his own money to Planned Parenthood. In 2008 he tells voters "I hate abortion".

On Giuliani's watch, New York's city employees, including police officers, were forbidden from asking a person's immigration status. He now talks of massively improved border controls, mandatory English classes and ID cards for all prospective citizens.

All of which makes him a tough sell to the religious right, even without his three marriages, the period he spent living with two gay friends after he separated from his second wife and his appearance in drag cuddling Donald Trump, readily available on YouTube.

Before Florida, Giuliani's campaign team must contest primaries in Michigan on Tuesday, where Romney has home field advantage, followed by South Carolina on Saturday, where Huckabee's appeal to evangelicals is may be crucial.

Any more heavy defeats on the scale of Iowa and New Hampshire could hole his campaign below the waterline before it leaves port.