The Orlando Sentinel styled today’s Florida primary election a wide-open race that could be decided by white evangelicals, a voter-bloc comprising 25 to 35 percent of likely GOP voters. But evangelicals there aren’t necessarily aligning with Huckabee, the Baptist minister on the ballot. In fact, they seem evenly split among three of the major GOP candidates:

“Each candidate speaks to a different interest of the evangelical perspective, and each is getting a share of the pocketbook and family-values vote,” said Pastor Joel Hunter, author of A New Kind of Conservative…A Mason-Dixon Florida Poll conducted this week showed 27 percent of self-described “born again” voters backed Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who combined a “FairTax” campaign pitch aimed at blue-collar voters with conservative “biblical” values to win a victory in the Iowa caucuses.

But 28 percent favored former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who once made much of his anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage credentials but is now touting himself as a businessman who can fix a “broken” Washington establishment. And 23 percent chose Arizona Sen. John McCain, a maverick conservative and supporter of the Iraq war who in 2000 blasted some evangelical leaders as “agents of intolerance.”

At this point, only Giuliani is already looking like an also-ran, polling just 9 percent. Let’s pretend we’re the Sunshine State. If you were voting today in Florida, which GOP candidate would you vote for and why? Tomorrow, we’ll see if our winner matches the one down south.

Over at the very respectable City Journal, Rudy Giuliani has just published an essay (more like a white paper) that is supposed to get him some attention in the presidential race. The subject, as expected, is homeland security, and most of it is very well-done, if boring - until the end. Giuliani says any homeland security plan needs to focus on “prevention, preparedness, and resilience,” and that’s what his essay discusses. The last one - resilience - is the freshest and most intriguing.

A resilient society depends on active, engaged citizens. The way for Washington to encourage resilience is not to throw more money at problems or to place new burdens on business. Government should harness the inherent strength of the American people and the private sector in order to build a society that may bend-but not break-if catastrophe does strike.

The American people are ready, willing, and able to take a more active role in our civil defense. As the White House’s own Lessons Learned report on the federal response to Hurricane Katrina notes, faith-based organizations and community groups successfully provided support to the victims of the hurricane “in spite of, not because of, the government.” Within 72 hours of Katrina’s hitting the Gulf Coast, for instance, a faith-based nonprofit organization-Helping Americans Needing Disaster Support (Hands)- formed to speed delivery of supplies to victims. Just a week after being created, Hands was sending 75 truckloads of supplies for every one FEMA truckload.

Giuliani’s secret weapon in this campaign is his focus on the future, on what’s to be done about this and that. Ron Paul sometimes seems stuck in the past (a rhetorical no-no if you’re trying to get people to elect you in the future), Huck and Mitt seem stuck in the present-tense of who’s the more likable Christian (another rhetorical no-no that lessens discussion of the future). Plans like Giuliani’s might seem less interesting than the Mormon vs. Baptist thing, but Giuliani keeps his rhetoric in the future tense (What’s to be done), and that just might get him elected.

. . . That’s the choice conservative evangelical voters face in a Republican primary season that has already narrowed to two frontrunners: Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. In his column this week, Joel Belz dissects the dilemma: Some of his friends, loyal WORLD subscribers among them, say that yes, Giuliani is wobbly on issues like life for the unborn and marriage . . .

But they think that overall he’s the tough-minded man the presidency requires-and they think he’s a straight-shooter whose word can be trusted even if you don’t like some of what he says. Such trust, they say, is especially critical with reference to Giuliani’s promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Roberts and Alito.

I haven’t been persuaded.

But a whole lot more of my friends and acquaintances have surprised me by swearing their early allegiance to Romney. Yes, they concede, they wish his eager pro-life and pro-traditional-marriage commitments had been part of his record for 15 years instead of just 15 months. But they like it (shouldn’t we all rejoice?) when a person admits he’s been wrong, and then embraces what’s right . . .

On this front, Joel writes — maybe more than on the first — he hasn’t been persuaded.

Why does Rudy Giuliani, who seems to do so many very unconservative things, like, say, living with an openly gay couple after getting kicked out of Gracie Mansion, still poll so well across the country? 

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