A new Marist poll released yesterday suggests that a Rudy Giuliani vs. Kirsten Gillibrand matchup for a U.S. Senate seat from New York would go to the former New York City Mayor, by a hefty margin -- he leads her by 54-40 percent in a hypothetical 2010 contest, according to the latest survey.

Meanwhile, the same poll shows Giuliani trailing potential Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo by a margin of 53-43 percent in a hypothetical 2010 contest for governor.

This backs up the argument I made in this piece yesterday, that Giuliani's apparent decision to pass on the Governor's race -- and give up a chance at a job for which he would be well suited, to run instead for a job that would likely drive him crazy -- is largely a function of his belief that he would have an easier time winning a contest for the U.S. Senate than for the governorship.

Does anybody at the Republican National Committee understand how insurance works?

Based on the events of late last week -- when the RNC acknowledged that for the last 18 years, its standard benefit employee health insurance plan had covered abortion services, and RNC Chairman Michael Steele moved to get ahead of a brewing pro-life storm by ordering that the insurance policies be amended to drop that particular coverage -- it's a fair question.

Let's back up a moment.

On Thursday, Politico revealed that since 1991, the Republican National Committee had offered as a part of its standard employee benefits package a health insurance policy that included coverage for elective abortion services.

Writing about a well-researched subject is a daunting task. How can you, as an author, find something new and/or interesting to say about something that’s been written about a dozen, or several score, or even hundreds of times?

Craig Shirley has definitively answered that question: Give them the back story — and the back story on the back story.

In other words, sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

In “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” Shirley goes where, at last count, roughly 900 authors — including Lou Cannon, William F. Buckley Jr., Martin and Annelise Anderson, Steven Hayward, Richard Reeves, Paul Kengor, Andrew Busch, and Peter Schweizer, among others — have already gone.

Well, Chris Christie’s campaign today demonstrated, yet again, its tactical brilliance.

Unfortunately, for Republicans who want to capture the New Jersey’s governor’s office again, it did so at the cost of demonstrating its strategic lunacy.

As anybody who’s paid even the slightest attention to the race over the last few months is now aware, the meta-story of the campaign is that incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine — who, based on upside-down personal favorables and job approval numbers, entered the campaign year trailing in every poll known to man — and was running so far behind just a few weeks ago that there was informed speculation Democrats would try to remove him from the ballot — has now scratched and clawed his way back into a statistical dead heat.

With four weeks left in the campaign, it’s a tossup.

If you're Marco Rubio and you're counting on generating millions of dollars in contributions for your Florida Senate primary contest against a sitting governor of your own party -- a guy you're trying to paint as a big-spending, President Obama-loving liberal -- do you think it helps you, or hurts you, to have the support of George W. Bush's right-hand man?

To many inside-the-Beltway conservative leaders, Karl Rove was one of the architects of the disaster that was the Bush administration:

Rove was the one behind the establishment of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit (read: the biggest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society);

Rove was the one pushing for comprehensive immigration overhaul (read: amnesty for illegal immigrants);

Rove was the one pushing Bush to sign McCain-Feingold (read: Rove wanted to lock in John McCain's support for Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, and was willing to trash the First Amendment if necessary);

Rove was the one who drove federal spending to new heights (read: Rove was the one who drove federal spending to new heights).

This should worry national Republican leaders.

According to last week's release by Rasmussen Reports, 74 percent of Republican voters believe the Republicans elected to represent them in the Congress have "lost touch" with GOP voters nationwide over the last several years, while just 18 percent of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing them.

And three times as many Republican voters -- 55 percent, vs. 17 percent -- believe the average Republican in Congress is more liberal than the average Republican voter, as believe the average Republican in Congress is more conservative than the average Republican voter.

Who will run the Republican Party's rebuilding in New York during the crucial 2010 election cycle, when the governorship, two U.S. Senate seats, and control of the legislature (and the redistricting that goes with it) is up for grabs?

New York's GOP chairman, Joseph M. Mondello, yesterday announced that he would leave his state party position and instead focus exclusively on a post he first won in 1983 and which he has held to this day -- chairman of the Nassau County Republican Party.

Views of Mondello's success or failure as GOP state chairman vary, depending on whom one asks. Establishment Republicans (the attitudinal, if not linear, descendants of the Dewey/Rockefeller wing of the party) seem to think he did a mediocre-to-poor job, while more conservative Republicans (the attitudinal, if not linear, descendants of the Buckley wing of the party) clearly think less of his two-year tenure.

Is Jon Corzine about to throw the long ball?

In the Garden State, GOP gubernatorial nominee Chris Christie's lead over incumbent Democratic Gov. Corzine is large, and growing larger -- 12 points, according to the latest survey by Quinnipiac University's Polling Institute, released this morning.

And Corzine, apparently, believes he may have to throw the long ball. But will his Hail Mary work, or will it end his campaign?

This race is not over, and national GOP leaders looking to tout a New Jersey victory as a "bellwether" would be wise to stay focused on execution for the next 112 days.

By the way, arguing against my last post, there actually was a president who had less experience in major public office before winning the presidency than would Sarah Palin, were she to win the White House after only two and a half years as governor -- Woodrow Wilson, who was elected president in 1912 after having been elected governor of New Jersey for the first time in 1910.

Of course, Wilson benefited from the split in the Republican Party -- former President Teddy Roosevelt chose to challenge incumbent president/Roosevelt successor William Howard Taft for the GOP nomination at the 1912 GOP national convention, and, failing to win, had left the GOP to form the Bull Moose Party to contest for the presidency in the general election.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's admission of an extramarital affair has knocked him out of the running for the GOP nomination for President in 2012. The question now is, whom has his withdrawal from the field most helped?

Answer: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

When Sanford resigns -- as he will most assuredly have to do -- the state's Lieutenant Governor, Andre Bauer, will ascend to the governorship.

Bauer, already an announced candidate for the GOP nomination next year, would become an incumbent running for election to a full term of his own in 2010.