With his candidacy cratering in multiple polls, Rudy Giuliani has hit on a new campaign strategy designed to turn things around: He's calling for more war on multiple fronts.
The New York Sun has the scoop on his new approach:
WASHINGTON — Mayor Giuliani will announce a new four-point war strategy in New Hampshire today, an effort to refocus a primary campaign season for Republicans that has centered in recent weeks less on foreign affairs and more on immigration and domestic issues.
Specifically, Mr. Giuliani will call for a new military surge in Afghanistan, a change in the way America's spies are promoted so that officers are rewarded for finding actionable intelligence and not just the number of agents they recruit, and a new war on Al Qaeda's intricate network of Web sites, sites used both to communicate with its agents in the field and to recruit new jihadis.
What's interesting is that the Rudy foreign policy adviser who leaked this to The Sun is being very explicit about the fact that this shift in direction reflects a belief within the Rudy camp that the Bhutto assassination has given him a political opening to turn things around:
"I think the problem in Pakistan and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto has raised a lot of concern and questions," the Giuliani campaign's senior foreign policy adviser, Charles Hill, said in an interview yesterday. "The media has focused on it, the American people have asked questions anew, it has certainly made clear that the challenge of Islamic radicalism is very much alive and very much a threat."
Not particularly subtle.
In his speech, which is coming later this morning in New Hampshire, Rudy will stick to four major themes, which The Sun describes as follows: "Expanding the military, improving intelligence, homeland security, and winning the war of ideas against radical Islam."
Asked where the new troops for the Afghanistan "surge" will come from, Rudy adviser Hill declined to go into detail, but notably, he did tell the paper that a Giuliani administration would seek to expand the military considerably.
The speech comes as a new poll released today shows that Rudy's national lead has evaporated completely -- John McCain now boasts more national support than Rudy does, while Mike Huckabee is running just behind him. The new Pew survey finds McCain with 22%, Rudy with 20%, and Huckabee with 17%.
The poll also finds that Rudy has sunk an astonishing 13 points nationally since September. This chart from Pew tells the story rather dramatically:

Rudy's whole game plan from the beginning has been to use the imagery of himself walking through the smoke and dust on 9/11 to persuade the national electorate that they need him to defend America against the terrorists lest we get hit with another 9/11 or worse. This hasn't worked out so well, as the above numbers show. So now he's doubling down on the strategy with a call for yet more war. Intriguing.
We'll bring you video of the speech as soon as it's available.