Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, worked in the Reagan administration as associate attorney general, the number three position in the Justice Department. At the time, Giuliani was the youngest associate attorney general in American history. Today, as he criss-crosses the country, speaking to Republican primary voters from Florida to Iowa to South Dakota to California, Giuliani is keen to emphasize his association with Reagan. He praises Reagan's "optimistic leadership." He emulates Reagan's toughness. He advocates so-called "Reaganomics."

And yet it would be a stretch to say that Giuliani is an adherent to the set of political ideas known as Reaganism. Giuliani adheres to Giuliani-ism. Where Reagan emphasized the enduring possibilities of freedom, Giuliani emphasizes the duties freedom imposes on citizens--the most important of which, in his opinion, is the duty of citizens to respect the law. Where Reagan set strategic goals, delegated authority (sometimes too broadly), and allowed room for his agency heads to innovate, Giuliani is a top-down executive known for micromanagement and for employing every possible legal authority to achieve his ends.

He also happens to have been one of the most effective chief executives in modern American history. Some view his doggedness, his maximalist position on every issue and the tactics he adopts, as a form of "authoritarianism," but that term is intended to insult rather than describe. It would be more accurate to call him a legalistic disciplinarian. And, indeed, one of the striking aspects of Giuliani's career is that, while he has tacked right in his quest for the 2008 nomination, his worldview seems to have remained consistent at least since his prosecutorial days.

Giuliani recalls one of his first meetings with Reagan. It was early in 1981, shortly after Reagan had been inaugurated as the nation's 40th president. Reagan had invited the 36-year-old former assistant United States attorney, along with an assortment of other would-be deputies and undersecretaries, to the White House for breakfast. There were between 20 and 25 people there in all, Giuliani remembers, and the conversation between the ambitious functionaries and the president was lighthearted. Mostly they talked baseball. Reagan reminisced about his days as a sportscaster in Iowa. Toward the end of the breakfast the appointees shook hands and had their picture taken with the president. Giuliani gave his photo to his mother.

Giuliani had joined the GOP only a few months prior to meeting Reagan for breakfast. The story of how he came to join the party is interesting, not only for what it tells us about Giuliani's partisan evolution, but also for what it suggests about his character, and the character of his political thought. A liberal who had penned columns in his college paper extolling John Kennedy's virtues, Giuliani opposed the Vietnam war and voted for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. "I had traditionally been a Democrat," Giuliani told me in a recent interview in Las Vegas. "It was almost like a refl ex mode. I actually remember saying to myself, 'If I was a person really deciding who should be president right now, I'd probably vote for Nixon, because I think the country would be safer with Nixon.' My concern was the Soviets, foreign policy, strong military." Whatever his concern, it was not enough to make Giuliani pull the lever for a Republican.