Giuliani's Policy Professor

It is clear, during these calls, that the group is proud of Giuliani's foreign policy stance and sees something historic in it. The candidate's essay in Foreign Affairs remains a touchstone and is discussed as the basis for upcoming speeches and articles.

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Giuliani framed the piece around the "long war" with Muslim fundamentalists and said the United States should not now be working toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. He advocated building a missile defense system and increasing the number of combat brigades, and he suggested that U.S. policy toward Iran, "should all else fail," might focus on destroying that nation's nuclear arsenal.

One of Simon's self-appointed roles during these calls is to urge the group toward even minor policy points that can distinguish Giuliani from the other candidates. Another role is to operate as a political compass, helping to ensure that the campaign's conservative message is preserved.

One recent Monday, the group was discussing a speech that Giuliani was scheduled to give before the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. "We have an embarrassment of riches with respect to federalism," Goldsmith said. "We have I bet the top 10 federalism scholars."

Simon jumped in. "Did you guys see the op-ed in today's [Wall Street] Journal by Stephen Calabresi?" he asked. Calabresi, an adviser to the campaign, is the founder of the Federalist Society and a proponent of originalism, a theory of law favored by many conservatives that stresses that constitutional questions should be informed by asking how the document was perceived in the framers' own time. "Maybe there's a way to weave some of the originalism into the speech in November." The group agreed to try.

In its composition and its intended audience, the Giuliani policy team can sometimes seem self-contained, a subsidiary of the conservative think-tank world. A lingering danger for the campaign is that with this association it may be linking itself too closely to unpopular policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and to an elite form of conservatism.

Some of Giuliani's foreign policy advisers in particular -- Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes and Michael Rubin -- seem similar in outlook and approach to the neoconservatives whom some blame for pushing the nation into the Iraq war.

Simon, who talks frequently of making sure that the policy team encompasses the whole sprawl of conservative ideas, is sensitive on this point. "The head of our foreign policy unit, Charles Hill, is not a neocon; Robert Conquest, Ruth Wedgewood, these people are not neocons," he said. "If you look to the people who came in to brief the mayor -- Tony Zinni is not a neocon. In fairness, I think it's an eclectic mix."

In some of the early primary states, the campaign's embrace of the conservative establishment and resulting distance from the Republican Party's grass roots -- such as evangelical Christians, who have reacted with suspicion if not hostility to Giuliani -- has looked like a political risk. The campaign in Iowa, said David Redlawsk, a political scientist at the University of Iowa and the director of the Hawkeye Poll, has been harmed by a perception that it is out of touch, a view that "is partly a consequence of having a campaign that operates from a top-down, East Coast perspective."

Simon and Giuliani's policy team spent much of the spring working to outline what the campaign has called its Twelve Commitments, promises Giuliani is making to the American voter. Some of these promises seem standard Republican fare: restoring fiscal discipline, cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code. In others, there are flickers of Giuliani's experience in New York (instituting school choice) and pugnaciousness (he promises "to keep America on offense in the terrorists' war on us").

And then there are policies that might please the conservative base: a declared preference for the strict-constructionist judges the base prefers, and a pledge to "increase adoptions, decrease abortions, and protect the quality of life for our children."

On the big questions, Simon seems content to let Giuliani stand for an extension of the Bush administration, with all the political promise and risk that contains.

When asked to detail the ways in which a Giuliani administration would be different from the Bush administration, he is reticent.

"I think I would shy away," Simon said, "from pointing out differences."