Californians for Rudy

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Curt Pringle, the conservative mayor of Anaheim and onetime speaker of the California State Assembly, is a pro-life Republican who endorsed pro-choice Rudy Giuliani for president in March, and since then he has been actively engaged in Giuliani's campaign. After conversations with Giuliani, Pringle takes at face value the former New York mayor's pledge to nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That reassurance on abortion makes it possible for Pringle and many other prominent California Republicans to pursue an ambitious political design.

Pringle and the state's other Giuliani supporters want to bring California back to relevance in selecting the Republican nominee and electing the president. They resent that the nation's most populous state is presumed to follow the lead of Iowa and New Hampshire in picking presidents. They resent California being consigned as a general election backwater, conceded to the Democrats. Pringle sees Giuliani resurrecting California as a significant player for both the nomination and the election.

What seemed fanciful in March looks more realistic in October. Giuliani has maintained double-digit leads in California over other Republicans all year. With the state's primary moved up to Feb. 5, and voting beginning a month earlier, its results could negate the outcome in early primaries in small states. Giuliani's popularity here with political leaders such as Pringle is based on the belief that he is the only Republican who can challenge Hillary Clinton in blue states -- New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as California.

Giuliani at first seemed, as presidential candidates generally do, to regard California simply as a money jackpot. Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, Giuliani's fund-raising dynamo, has a home in Del Mar and is an active overseer of the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley. Pickens and other veterans of George W. Bush's fund-raising put Giuliani in front of the California GOP money chase.

Beyond fundraisers, Giuliani's campaign has signed up more prominent California Republicans than other presidential candidates -- most recently former governor Pete Wilson. Like Giuliani, Wilson is pro-choice. Another Giuliani backer is the liberal multi-millionaire Richard Riordan, who as mayor of Los Angeles called himself a RINO -- Republican in name only. "Rudy Giuliani is too liberal for the solid, right-wing Republicans in California," Riordan said recently.

But Republican politics always has been a mystery to Riordan, and he does not realize Giuliani's acceptance on the California right. In contrast to Wilson's defiant pro-choice advocacy, Giuliani trumpets his personal opposition to abortion. His first important California backer and his state chairman is a conservative: Bill Simon Jr., who trounced Riordan in the 2002 gubernatorial primary.

Simon has helped amass a long roster of conservatives, including: Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich; former state senator Chuck Poochigian; former U.S. energy secretary John Herrington; entrepreneur Bill Mundell (son of Nobel economic laureate Robert Mundell); former state party chairman Frank Visco; and congressmen David Dreier, Ed Royce, George Radanovich and Devin Nunes.

Behind the names are rank-and-file Republicans. The RealClearPolitics.com average of all polls for the month preceding Oct. 14 gave Giuliani a 14-point lead in California over Fred Thompson. He is 21 points ahead in the most recent survey by the Field poll. With Republican delegates winner-take-all in each congressional district, Giuliani today would capture nearly all of the state's 173 delegates.

The conventional wisdom is that California firepower will be to no avail if Mitt Romney romps through Iowa and New Hampshire, as John Kerry did in 2004 to clinch the Democratic nomination. Would California and the other 19 Republican primaries on Feb. 5 then rubber-stamp Romney, as later Democratic primaries did Kerry?

Not necessarily, concedes one of Romney's top strategists, who believes two candidates will survive into Feb. 5. The presumption in political circles is that there are contests in so many states that day that no candidate can campaign or even run TV ads in California. That is not true of Giuliani. His supporters here have the funds and organization to actively seek those 173 delegates, setting the stage for what they hope will be a death struggle with Clinton in the Golden State.

¿ 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.