It’s hardly news in the world of politics that one-time rivals often become best friends forever once one of them beats the other one. Case in point: Rudy Giuliani’s fervet embrace of John McCain once Rudy’s Florida firewall strategy imploded and McCain was on his way to becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Giuliani even hopped on the Straight Talk Express for some face-to-face schmoozing with the

traveling press. At one point, according to a story in the current issue of The New Yorker, Giuliani made the following case for McCain:

“When I endorsed John, I pointed out that, as far as I can see, he’s the only candidate we have that can put virtually fifty states in play,” Giuliani said, pouring out some carefully worded frustrations about how his party has shrivelled in the Northeast. “That doesn’t mean he can win fifty states. Nobody ever wins fifty states. It means he can compete in fifty states. When he’s nominated, there’ll be an active campaign in New York, there’ll be an active campaign in New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, California, Washington, Oregon. If somebody else is nominated, they’ll go back to the thirty-five-state strategy. This is very frustrating for Republicans in this part of the world. They haven’t had a Presidential campaign since probably ’84, maybe ’88 in some places. It’s also helped to deteriorate the Party.”

So? Well, it wasn’t that many weeks ago that Giuliani was repeatedly claiming that he was the only guy in the GOP who could credibly mount a 50-state campaign. But, hey times change.

A new poll of registered voters in Minnesota 10 months before the general election Democratic presidential candidates handily beating their Republican counterparts — with the notable exception of John McCain.

The poll, conducted by this week by SurveyUSA for three of the state’s TV stations, posed head-to-head matchups of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama against McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani or Mike Huckabee.

A few grains of salt: Much like national polls at this stage in the campaign, this poll can be as much about name recognition as about the state of the race if the election were held today. Also, with a relatively small sample size of 550 poll respondents, the survey has a whopping margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. That said, here are the matchups:

McCain, 49%
Clinton, 45%
Undecided, 6%

McCain, 49%
Obama, 42%
Undecided, 9%

Clinton, 50%
Romney, 40%
Undecided, 9%

Obama, 55%
Romney, 36%
Undecided, 10%

Clinton, 51%
Giuliani, 40%
Undecided, 9%

Obama, 52%
Giuliani, 36%
Undecided, 11%

Clinton, 50%
Huckabee, 42%
Undecided, 8%

Obama, 49%
Huckabee, 42%
Undecided, 10%

Full poll results and methodology are available here.

Mitt Romney’s win in Michigan leaves the Republican contest all shook up — and that means that all the leading candidates have a genuine shot at winning the nomination in St. Paul.

Republicans seem to farther away from settling on a nominee than they did before the Iowa caucuses kicked things off. At least back then it was easy — wrong, as it turns out, but easy — to forget Mike Huckabee and to dismiss Sen. John McCain.

Even now, it’s tempting to discount Fred Thompson, who hasn’t managed anything better than third place so far. But then again, he was only one percentage point behind Romney in New Hampshire. And now the race heads South.

Even Rudy Giuliani’s chances appear to grow stronger with each passing election that fails to produce a clear front-runner.

What it all adds up to is this: anything seems possible, and moreso by the day.

Here’s a candidate-by-candidate assessment as we head for the next great mystery in South Carolina on Saturday.

Mitt Romney
A series of silver-medal finishes might actually be the ticket to winning the nomination this year, and now with a decisive win in Michigan, Romney has strengthened his position. Sure, he was born and raised there, but then again he’s been away for decades. And perhaps more important, he won or at least fared well with conservatives and religious voters — two groups that he’s had trouble persuading so far. It’s hard to say where his next win will come. But maybe he doesn’t need another one; maybe he just keeps collecting his silver medals all the way to the top step of the podium in St. Paul.

Sen. John McCain
No question, the Michigan loss was a big blow. He won the state in 2000, but didn’t come close this time, despite carrying the momentum out of New Hampshire. The glimmer of hope in the Michigan results is this: as badly as he lost, he nevertheless won handily among voters who said Iraq was the most important issue and among military veterans. And South Carolina has a larger percentage of veterans than does Michigan. On the downside, South Carolina is also more conservative than Michigan and McCain faltered there in 2000 when he was the victim of a below-the-radar smear campaign.

Mike Huckabee
He’s a southerner, and his appeal to evangelical voters — which jolted the Iowa caucuses — could very well carry the day on Saturday. After New Hampshire, Huckabee conceded Michigan and, as he said last night, planted his flag in South Carolina. On the downside, he’s not the only southerner on the ballot.

Fred Thompson
Could South Carolina be the state that revives the former senator from Tennessee? He’ll have to duke it out with Huckabee, but at least he’s back on more familiar ground. And with the race remaining incredibly fluid and with so many voters making up their minds at the last minute, who knows what chord he might strike, just as Romney did in the closing days in Michigan.

Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani’s national, Super Tuesday strategy is looking more and more plausible. Florida is coming up on Jan. 29, and he’s running neck-and-neck-and neck with McCain, Huckabee and Romney there. And he could win in big states like New York, New Jersey and California on Feb. 5. On the downside, as bsimon noted in a clever comment to an earlier post here, every time Giuliani focuses on a new state, his numbers there go down.

What do you think happens next? Are you ready to eliminate any of them from contention? How and where and when does this all get settled?

And finally, just to recap the race so far, here are the results for the top candidates in each state, with the winner in bold.

The Republicans
……………………….Huckabee……McCain…..Romney
Iowa…………………….34……………13………..25….
New Hampshire………11……………37………..32….
Michigan……………….16……………30………..39….

Thanks to the Coen brothers, Fargo has been something of a punchline for the better part of a decade. Now, however improbably, it’s also become a kind of a mini-Ground Zero of

the presidential campaign.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama will open his North Dakota field office there on Saturday, just a week after Republican Rudy Giuliani blew into town for a quick fundraiser. (Giuliani beat Obama to the organizational punch, opening his own Fargo field office last summer, the first and until now, only other presidential candidate to do so.)

Given its tiny population and deeply red hue (voting for the Republican candidate in every election since 1968), North Dakota might seem like an odd place for a Democrat to spend time and money. But it’s part of the jackpot on Feb. 5, the so-called Super Duper Tuesday when nearly two dozen states (Minnesota among them) hold their primaries and caucuses. Steve Hildebrand, a deputy manager of the Obama campaign, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday that “a lot of states the size of North Dakota are going to voice their wishes on Feb 5 … It’s important that rural voters have the opportunity to play a real role in deciding who the party puts forward as a nominee for president.”

Although Obama’s North Dakota campaign will be headed by a former state Democratic chairman, his Chicago-based organizers initially weren’t geographically astute when they announced the opening of the Fargo office. Their web page originally superimposed “Fargo, N.D.” over a map of Pennsylvania, a flub merrily lampooned by a conservative North Dakota blogger earlier this week. By this morning, the map had been corrected. �
 

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Americans may (or may not) be ready to elect a woman as their president. Same goes for electing an African-American. But if a half-century of history is any indication, they’re not about to elect a bald president (sorry, Rudy; sorry, Fred).

A sure indication we’ve entered one of the sloughs of the presidential campaign (races solidifying, story lines getting tiresome, still weeks away from meaningful votes) is the fact that people (well, a few) have begun musing on the whether a requirement of the presidency is a hirsute head.

Time magazine kicked it off about a week ago, pointing out that the United States last

elected a bald president in 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower knocked off the equally chrome-domed Adlai Stevenson.

That made him only the fifth hairless president, by the magazine’s recknoning, and the first since Martin Van Buren,

elected in 1836.

Predictably, babbling over presidential baldness popped up all over the Internet, most of it focusing on Rudy Giuliani’s decision to stride out of the closet and show himself to be bald and proud five years ago when he abandoned his unfortunate (and widely ridiculed) comb-over. That momentous moment in American political history was memorably chronicled in the Washington Post. (Before, with predecessor John Lindsay, after, in Minneapolis recently.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, advocates for the hair-challenged — including doctors who specialize on hair transplants — were all too happy to jump into the fray.

Minnesota politics bonus: Often mentioned in the discussion of the hairstyles of presidentical candidates was former Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassan, he of the quadrennial quixotic presidential campaigns and the startling toupee once compared to ” sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze.”

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Everyone knows that Iowans take their presidential politics way more seriously than most Americans, but this is ridiculous.

The Des Moines Register, longtime depository of all things you could ever want to know about the Iowa caucuses, has performed a public service for readers who want to mingle their politics with Halloween: “Carve a candidate” templates of the presidential candidates that can be used to carve a jack-o-lantern with the visage of, say, John McCain (who loves to say he’s got “more scars than Frankenstein”).

Alas, the templates include only the six candidates at the front of the pack, so supporters of Dennis Kucinich and Tom Tancredo are out of luck.

(And who says newspapers no longer perform the vital civic function they once did?)

No sooner did Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign announce last week that he’d won the endorsement of Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek than a controversy from Stanek’s past was hung around Giuliani’s neck.

Citing what “a rival campaign has pointed out to us,” the lefty blog Talking Points Memo resurrected the details of Stanek’s long-ago, documented, use of a racial epithet that sank his career as state Public Safety Commissioner in 2004.

 No word so far from the Giuliani campaign and no indication who the tipster might have been. By midday Monday, a Google search had turned up 11,000 references to the situation — but no news stories as of yet, according to Nexis.

When Rudy Giuliani was in Minneapolis this week, a week marked by by increasingly bitter rhetoric among the Republican presidential frontrunners, he was asked about the apparent violation of Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment (thou shalt not speak ill of thy Republican brethren).

He was all sweetness and light, saying he doesn’t engage in that kind of thing. “If you look at my statements, you’ll see I get criticized for spending too much time on the Democrats,” he said. “The only time I mention [other Republicans] is when I have to defend myself against false charges and exaggerated charges.” As the party’s current front runner, “the liability is that everyone else shoots at you,” he continued. “I’ve been in politics a long time and you deal with the hand you’ve been dealt. I don’t take it personally, but if I’m falsely attacked, I have to answer.”

That was Thursday morning. Within 24 hours, Giuliani’s campaign fired off its own shot against Mitt Romney in an e-mail to reporters that went on for 10 pages. Its subject line? “MITT & HILLARY SINGING FROM THE SAME SONG SHEET.”

On topics ranging from Roe vs. Wade to abortion and gun control, the campaign cherry-picked quotes from Romney and Hillary Clinton in a way that made them look like political. Siamese twins. Its conclusion: “Mitt Romney’s latest political pandering proves yet again he is merely a candidate of convenience. Mitt’s ever-changing positions and negative attacks scream of a losing candidate who has spent millions of his own money only to find Republican voters want something he cannot buy — true leadership.”

  In other intra-party squabbling news, Barack Obama sent out his own e-mail to reporters Friday that actually mentioned Clinton by name in an attack, something he’s been loath to do to date. By holding a rural issues forum at a Washington lobbying firm, the e-mail read, “it seems like Senator Clinton is listening to Washington lobbyists instead of spending time in Iowa with folks who have been farming for decades.” However, the harsh words weren’t attributed to the candidate who says he’s not going to wallow in the attack politics of the past. Rather, they were placed in the mouth of Gary Lamb, the former head of the Iowa Farmer’s Union.
 

And it’s still only October…      

When Rudy Giuliani blew into Peter’s Grill Thursday morning to grip and grin with a couple hundred supporters and get some face time with the local news media, he was quick to pounce on Hillary Clinton, rather than his Republican rivals. But another Clinton overshadowed his appearance at the venerable downtown Minneapolis diner.   

Now that the third-quarter presidential fundraising stats have been released by the Federal Election Commission, some interesting nuggets emerged about contributors from Minnesota, beyond the big-picture story of the money race.