Run, Rudy, run? The former New York mayor is a favorite, but not visible.

'I'M pro-choice, I'm pro-gay rights," Rudolph Giuliani told reporters in 1999 after a visit to then--presidential candidate George W. Bush. "There are people in the Republican party who don't agree with that." Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time but not yet the 9/11 hero he would become, might also have added that he is pro-gun control, and that there are people in the Republican party who don't agree with that, either.

Taken together, those three positions would not seem a recipe for electoral success in the Republican party, at least not outside of New York. But last forward seven years, to February 2006. Giuliani has not changed his views on abortion, gays, or guns. And yet a Gallup poll, seeking to identify frontrunners in the race for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, found that 33 percent of registered Republicans surveyed nationwide said they would be "most likely" to support ... Rudolph Giuliani. That put the former mayor five points ahead of Sen. John McCain, 26 points ahead of Sen. George Allen, 27 points ahead of Sen. Bill Frist, and 30 points ahead of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

It's true that polls at this stage are mostly a measure of name recognition, and Giuliani, like McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton, has that in spades. Bait Giuliani's showing is more than just name recognition. It's also a measure of how much 9/11 credentials could mean in the coming GOP race: They matter so much that a man who might be dismissed for his other views is a serious contender.

There's another factor at work, too. Giuliani is trying a strategy that's markedly different from that of his fellow Republicans: He's not actually running for president, at least at the moment. While the other guys crisscross the early primary states, looking for the kind of name recognition that Giuliani already has, Giuliani, who has often said he won't decide on a run until after the '06 mid-term elections, is holding back. "We haven't seen any campaign activity out of him," says Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican party. "He hasn't been out here recently," says Sarah Sauber of the Iowa Republican party. "Hasn't been to New Hampshire this year," says Jen Wrobleski of that state's GOP.

Giuliani's absence from the primary states has led some observers to suggest he's not going to be a candidate at all. And it's certainly true he has a lot going on apart from politics. Giuliani's security consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, which he founded in 2002, has become enormously successful. He has branched out into investment banking. He makes millions as a public speaker. And in March 2005 Giuliani announced that he was joining the Texas-based finn of Bracewell & Patterson (now called Bracewell & Giuliani) to head its recently opened New York office. Even if he weren't campaigning for anything, he'd be a busy man.

But Giuliani may also be said to be running a kind of non-candidacy candidacy. For several years now, he's been playing the role of GOP statesman, traveling around the country helping other Republicans with their races, not his. "'Right now, he is dedicated to helping Republicans maintain the House and Senate in '06 and doesn't do any personal events," says Anthony Carbonetti, a top executive of Giuliani Partners and a close Giuliani adviser. "It's all on behalf of the party."

It's something Giuliani did to an extraordinary degree in 2004. Reading from an old schedule book, Carbonetti goes down Giuliani's campaign schedule in the final days of that race. "On November 1st, he did five events in Florida; on October 31st, Derry, New Hampshire, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Youngstown, Ohio; on October 30th, Pittsburgh; on October 29th, Madison, Wisconsin, St. Paul, Minnesota, Mason, Iowa, and South Dakota ..." The list goes on for quite a while.

All that campaigning created a lot of friends and political IOUs for Giuliani, chits he can cash in if he chooses to run in '08. "We know that Mayor Giuliani was out there for President Bush," says South Carolina's chairman Dawson. "People connect the dots that Rudy Giuliani was part of the success against John Kerry." Giuliani's position in the party is so strong that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has chosen him to headline its annual fundraiser this May in Washington. "He's a huge attraction," says one NRSC official.

But there is still that issues problem. "Giuliani has a tremendous reservoir of good will for how he handled 9/11, and a lot of people give him credit for his management of New York, which was no small task," says one close adviser to an acknowledged Republican presidential candidate. "But clearly, because of his positions on the cultural issues of abortion, guns, and gays, he would probably have trouble in the long term being attractive to conservatives in the party--even if it were just two out of the three issues."

While Giuliani's strategists argue that there's a wide range of issues at stake in the race--"He'll say, 'On cutting taxes, smaller government, protecting the homeland, protecting your neighborhood, I'm more of a Republican than most [Republicans],'" says Carbonetti--the GOP has never nominated a presidential candidate with Giuliani's views on social questions. And that will be a huge hurdle. "If you talk to conservatives, they would say, 'I really like him on security things. He was a great mayor, he's a good leader. But ...'" says Republican pollster David Winston. In Giuliani's case, "but" means I don't know if I can vote for him.

What can Giuliani do? The answer is, There's no clear answer. "How does Rudy overcome the social issues?" asks Guy Molinari, a former congressman from New York who is close to Giuliani. "There are ways of doing it."

Well, how, specifically?

"I don't know," says Molinari.

That's not a joke. Nobody else knows, either. Certainly Giuliani can't change his positions; doing that would destroy his reputation as a stand-up guy and turn him into a flip-flopper. And while he can't run away from his positions, he can't run on them, either; doing that would kill him with too many Republican primary voters.

But there are some possible strategies. On abortion, in particular, Giuliani might be able to finesse the issue by stressing his support for conservative judges of the sort appointed by George W. Bush--and pledge to appoint more of them if elected. He also might benefit from the fact that some of the other top-tier candidates--McCain, Allen, and Romney, to name three--don't have perfect pro-life credentials, either. Those factors ,night be enough to help Giuliani past the issue.

But most of all, Giuliani will need to play the security issue so well and so strongly that the social issues are diminished in their relative importance. If there were to be another terrorist attack in the United States between now and the primary season, his strength would become even more formidable. And if there isn't, security is likely to remain a top concern, although not the only one, among Republican primary voters. The question then will be, Is that enough? "What's going to happen is that Giuliani has to take the one facet that conservatives like and make it so important that the other facets don't matter," says Winston. "That's a tall order."

It certainly is. And in the end, there's always the possibility that Giuliani will decide not to run at all. He knows that if he does, he will surely lace more questions than just those about the issues. Reporters--and his opponents--will want to know what, precisely, he has been doing with Giuliani Partners to make all that money. And what about his work with the law finn? And what's going on in his personal life after the contentious divorce that was a factor in his decision not to run for the Senate in 2000?

Giuliani might decide that he just doesn't need the trouble. On the other hand, he has often said he would like to run for office again. Some people thought that might mean running for governor of New York this year, but Giuliani declined. The next race is for the presidency in 2008, and were he to win, he would be 64 years old on Inauguration Day. If he is ever going to run, this is the time.

And social issues or not, a lot of Republicans would like to see him do it. "If he'll come do something [in South Carolina], we'll fill the room for him," says Dawson. "Giuliani has as good a chance as anybody right now. But he's got to come work and put some rubber on the road. It's not too late, but the fact is, it has started."