Vanity Fair: Rudy = Crazy (but he just might win)

This Vanity Fair article reads like a hit piece on Rudy Giuliani but still manages to be optimistic about his chances:

Bush and Cheney have created a sense of something like guilt, or embarrassment, or, even, disgrace, among the faithful. Potential candidates on the traditional right seem to be hiding under a rock—they don't want the Bush-Cheney taint. So to find yourself a nationally admired figure (a kind of apple pie), in a field where something like 70 percent of likely voters (many your natural ideological enemies) still haven't expressed any opinion about the race, and where the opposition includes the 70-year-old John McCain, who both hates and sucks up to Bush (therefore getting neither advantage), and Mitt Romney, a Mormon from Massachusetts, that's luck. What's more, choosing a relative social liberal—just at the moment when the religious right seems to have lost its way—with supersonic national-security cred might be a way to combine independents with Reagan Democrats, along with the South (which you get anyway), and for the Republicans to actually, miraculously, win.

Barring a complete Democratic meltdown or a miraculous solution to the Iraq War, I don't see the Republicans winning in 2008 no matter who their candidate is. But Rudy probably has a better shot than anyone else.

UPDATE: The New York Times ponders which tack Giuliani will take in the debate tonight: hard-hitting prosecutor or Mr. Nice Guy...