MAYBE ROMNEY OR THOMPSON HAS STARTED SENDING THOSE PICTURES OF RUDY IN DRAG AROUND... BUT HIS SUPPORT IS FOLLOWING IN McCAIN'S FOOTSTEPS

The polling tells the story. His goose doesn't look cooked, but certainly plucked, dressed, and in the oven. Time to make the relish. Now we know None of the Above is leading the Republican pack of would-be Bush replacements but this was an incredibly fast collapse first for McCain-- with his imperious pronouncements against the Republican right on immigration and against the Republican center on Iraq-- and then for Giuliani. Giuliani? The front runner? Yeah, that one.

While he has consistently remained ahead in polls of Republican voters, and his campaign is in infinitely better financial shape than McCain's, Giuliani's trend in support is eerily similar to McCain's downward trajectory.

Since early March, Giuliani's support has fallen by an estimated 8 percentage points. McCain's fell by 10 points since January. And the rate of decline has been a bit steeper for Giuliani than for McCain. The saving grace for Giuliani has been that he started his decline from a higher point, around 33%, while McCain's slump started down from 25%.

Giuliani's national slide is also mirrored in the early primary states, as is the case with McCain.

And in the key early states likely to decide who comes in second after None of the Above, Giuliani is getting thumped by Romney in New Hampshire and Iowa and is starting to be displaced by Fred Thompson in Florida and South Carolina. Michael Gerson in this morning's Washington Post says its even worse: Giuliani tries to paint himself as another Reagan; Gerson says he's Nixon.

In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious conservative. "Permissiveness," he told key aides, "is the key theme," and Nixon pressed that theme against hippie protesters, tenured radicals and liberals who bad-mouthed America. This kind of secular, tough-on-crime, tough-on-communism conservatism gathered a "silent majority" that loved Nixon for the enemies he made.

By this standard, Giuliani is a Nixon Republican. He is perhaps the most publicly secular major candidate of either party-- his conflicts with Roman Catholic teaching make him more reticent on religion than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But as a prosecutor and mayor of New York, he won conservative respect for making all the right enemies: the ACLU, advocates of blasphemous art, purveyors of racial politics, Islamist mass murderers, mob bosses and the New York Times editorial page.

On the evidence of the polls, many conservatives are ready for a little cultural combat, and Giuliani looks like a man who knows how to use a knife. He might successfully appeal to blue-collar resentment against liberal elitism and Democratic antiwar overreach, while winning back some pro-choice, suburban female voters.

But the Nixon example is also a warning. His presidency -- from wage and price controls to the nomination of Justice Harry Blackmun-- could hardly be called a conservative success story. As president, Nixon was a talented man without an ideological compass, mainly concerned with the accumulation of power. Giuliani's 1994 endorsement of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo-- the modern hero of Democratic liberalism-- also indicates some loose ideological moorings. And, as with Nixon, Giuliani's combativeness, on occasion, blurs into pettiness.

And what a knack for picking good people to surround himself with! The examples of what a truly terrible judge of character Rudy is never stop coming in. Everyone knows about his close personal ties with organized crime through his partner Bernard Kerik, his ties to the worst elements of the Catholic Church through his tightly held associate, child-molesting priest Alan Placa, his ties to a vast right wing South Carolina cocaine distribution conspiracy through the Ravenel Family, and about his change of heart regarding prostitution, especially when it comes to David Diapers Vitter, his capo for the Confederacy... but his list of co-chairs for his California campaign reads like a list of disasters about to pop: Jerry Lewis, the most corrupt member of Congress in America and under investigation by the FBI joins flamboyant closet queen David Dreier