As for the abortion issue, it’s true that Johnson is a pro-choice Republican who could run as operationally pro-life. But most of the conservatives who would be inclined to back him rejected this argument when it came from Rudy Giuliani in 2007-08. It will be hard to walk that back simply because Johnson’s foreign policy is more to our liking. Though Johnson does have the advantages of having an actual record of signing pro-life bills as governor and he has gone a step further than Giulaini by supporting the reversal of Roe v Wade [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

Those last two points make some difference, don’t they? As governor, Johnson signed parental consent and partial-birth abortion ban legislation. At least by the standards of most national Republicans, that makes him as “operationally pro-life” as anyone, and he managed to do those things without engaging in a lot of absurd pandering by telling phony conversion stories. It makes a difference that Johnson has signed pro-life legislation. That is as much as most of his likely competitors in 2012 have done on this issue, and in some cases it goes beyond what other probable candidates did while in office. Giuliani’s claims that he would satisfy pro-life voters once in office were based on nothing in his record, so there was no reason to accept what he was saying.

In any case, what made Giuliani such a ridiculous candidate was not his socially liberal views. That made it impossible for him to be nominated, but it seems to me that everyone sympathetic to Johnson already accepts that he isn’t going to get anywhere near the nomination. What made Giuliani’s candidacy so ridiculous was that he proposed to run as the national security candidate solely on the basis of having happened to be New York’s mayor during a major terrorist attack, and that he refused to bother campaigning actively anywhere except Florida. If Johnson campaigns in a similar way, he will deserve the same mockery.