James, while we could certainly use a President whose solution to many problems is to do nothing, I’m afraid the “do nothing” compromise doesn’t settle as much as it first seems. We’ve never had a conservative president who really crusaded on social issues, with the exception of the imaginary version of George W. Bush dreamed up by some of the wackier liberals.

But ultimately, a president is either going to sign socially conservative legislation or he isn’t. He is either going to veto socially liberal legislation or he isn’t. (Ladies, I am using “he” in the old-fashioned gender-nonspecific sense.) Whether Giuliani will sign a hypothetical Republican Congress’s pro-life bills into law or veto Democratic immigration legislation is exactly what people are questioning and debating. Unless you are proposing that Giuliani simply allow all bills concerning social issues to become law without his signature, which, come to think of it, might not be a bad idea — it is just not a very likely one.