It tells you something about the state of the American right that Rudy Giuliani is having a very hard time deciding whether to run for the Republican nomination in 2008. He either has the highest ratings of the plausible candidates among Republican voters, or near the highest.

His image will for ever be fused with the heroism of the response to 9/11. His legacy is the ravishing revival of New York City in the 1990s. Nobody doubts his effectiveness as a manager, or the charisma he brings to the political arena. No other Republican has his star power. And yet he has been inching only tentatively towards a real decision, and still hasn’t pulled the lever.

There are various plausible explanations for Giuliani’s equivocation. Some argue that the New York tabloids are sitting on a pile of sleaze to be hurled in his general direction once he hits the truly big time. It’s plausible. You don’t get to turn New York City around without knowing and persuading many unsavoury urban characters. It would not be a shock to discover that some of that rubbed off.

He’s also making a small fortune in the consultancy business and the speaking circuit — money he’d forfeit in a presidential run and clients who might not like the public scrutiny involved. Besides, he’s already a hero. Why ruin it with a campaign that would only expose all his faults, errors and flaws?

All of these factors might be at play in Giuliani’s mind. But the lukewarm response to him from the party’s base cannot be a plus. Here’s a quote of last week from a key leader of the religious right, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council: “He’s the frontrunner but it’s kind of like here in DC, you drive over the Potomac [river] at night and it looks beautiful but if you get down near it you certainly wouldn’t want to take anything out of it and eat it. It’s polluted; it’s got problems.”

A more elevated expression of the base’s discomfort came from Terry Jeffrey last week. Jeffrey is an editor at Ronald Reagan’s favourite journal, Human Events and wrote a column for National Review, the leading conservative magazine, that politely described Giuliani as anathema to conservatism.

You might well rub your eyes. Giuliani is for low taxes, law and order (often at the expense of civil liberties) and strong defence. As a prosecutor, he went after white-collar crooks like Michael Milken and Marc Rich as well as mafia hoods. He has a sterling antiterrorist record. In 1995 he famously ejected the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from a concert at the Lincoln Center in New York because Arafat had not been formally invited. “Maybe we should wake people up to the way this terrorist is being romanticised,” Giuliani explained.

You’d think this record would count as “conservative”. You’d think this colourful, capable, intelligent man would be the Republican party’s dream candidate. He was Time magazine’s person of the year in 2001. He has been called “America’s mayor”.

After a presidency criticised for incompetence, Giuliani is a details-oriented, results-driven manager. Seconds after his inauguration, Americans would feel safer.

But read Terry Jeffrey’s ideological indictment: “Giuliani’s positions on abortion and marriage disqualify him as a conservative because they annihilate the link between the natural law and man-made laws. Indeed, they use man-made law to promote and protect acts that violate the natural law.”

Giuliani’s heretical positions on abortion and marriage are as follows: he believes that abortion should be legal and that gay couples should be able to enter civil unions (but not civil marriage). The evangelical base of the Republicans believes that any civil recognition of gay couples is an attack on the family and that any defence of the right to a legal abortion is anathema.

For good measure, Giuliani is also fine with embryonic stem-cell research and mellow on immigration. So he would be to the right of David Cameron (he’d shoot a hoodie before he hugged one), but he is far too far to the left for the vocal elements of the Republican base.

Then there’s the personal life. Giuliani has been married three times. He divorced his second wife while having an affair with a staffer whom he then married. It got ugly for a while. Worse: during his estrangement from his second wife, he lived in the house of a gay couple who were friends. He has also dressed in drag on several occasions. You can YouTube a clip of him in full drag being courted by Donald Trump in a department store. New Yorkers loved it. But it doesn’t go down too well in South Carolina.

Or does it? The polling is extremely clear: Giuliani, for all his heretical tendencies, is still ahead of every other Republican candidate. Moreover, a recent Gallup poll found only 23% of Republican voters deeming him “unacceptable” compared with 41% saying the same for John McCain. The salient question to ask is: if Giuliani is so abhorrent to conservatives, why is he polling so well?

We don’t know the answer to that yet. It’s hard to gauge a campaign’s viability before it has begun. My view is that the managers and spokesmen of the base may be misreading the real mood of the evangelical rank and file. They’re more pragmatic than their leaders. If Hillary Clinton is the alternative, many Republicans will overlook Giuliani’s social moderation.

Moreover, there is a growing sense even among hardline conservatives that they may have overreached badly these past few years. Their stridency on abortion, gays, stem-cell research and end-of-life issues has begun to lose them many voters in the suburbs, the Midwest and the Mountain West. They are worried that the thumping loss in the midterm elections of 2006 was not a blip but the turning of a tide against them.

If they believe that, maybe Giuliani is the perfect antidote. Maybe he could rid the Republicans of their metastasising image as a Southern, intolerant and corrupt machine, and rebuild a more national and inclusive Republican party.

Or maybe, of course, his candidacy could be the final coup de grâce for a coalition already sinking under its own divisions. We don’t know yet — and neither does Rudy. So we wait for him, as he waits for others, and as the 2008 campaign waits for no one.

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