What is Rudy up to?

Chuck Todd:

These should be great days for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

With long shot Mike Huckabee supplanting Mitt Romney as the frontrunner in Iowa, the early state fight among the Republicans is a jumbled mess. And that's the exact same scenario that the Giuliani campaign has been counting on for its big state delegate strategy to work.

And yet, there's something amiss right now with Giuliani's effort.

Perhaps it was fitting that during the last Republican debate, Giuliani's podium was off to the side, almost out of the picture. Save from a few negative stories in the New York tabs and the tough "Meet the Press" interview earlier this month, Giuliani has seemed to shrink away from the current campaign narrative.

His camp tried to insert Giuliani back into the mix with speech last weekend in Florida. The speech read well, though how the campaign chose to showcase it was just plain odd.

First, Giuliani read from prepared text, not a teleprompter. Second, the campaign chose a location far away from where most of the national political press corps was residing. Third, he did it on a Saturday, a day when folks just aren’t too tuned into news.

I get the idea of the speech and the symbolism surrounding Florida. But why not speak on a Monday, and drive the news chatter for the rest of the week? Or why not do it on a Thursday and get people talking over the weekend? Saturday news events can get lost, and this one, in particular, was about trying to get the press to refocus its Giuliani narrative (which was getting lost) and they did it on the hardest day to make news.

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He hasn’t made either Iowa or New Hampshire a priority, though he hasn’t totally ruled out campaigning in either state either.

So the question is, did Giuliani's camp miscalculate this decision to "kinda, sorta" campaign in the early states? One can sense the conflict in how the campaign goes about putting together its Iowa and New Hampshire itineraries.

On the one hand, they sense an opportunity to pull a Dukakis in Iowa and finish a surprising third, which then boomerangs him into New Hampshire.

But the campaign also is worried about handing another candidate, Romney in particular, a chance to claim victory over Giuliani in one of the early states.

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Which brings me back to Giuliani’s conundrum. The campaign has clearly decided it has to go all-in on this Florida and Feb. 5 strategy, but doesn’t want to be out of the storyline from Dec. 26 to Jan. 9, when the national press corps is embedded in Iowa and New Hampshire.

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Giuliani's campaign problems go beyond state strategy. When he's out there, our NBC/NJ reporter Matthew Berger tells me he doesn't hold nearly the number of events as his competitors, focusing instead on fundraising.

Raising this much money, this close to the primaries means one of two things: He's trying to shock everyone with the amount he has in the bank to regain front-runner status (particularly since he wants this money to prove he can play nationally), or he's worried that his fourth quarter totals will look no better than the rest of the field, making him look like just another candidate who happened to not do well in the early states.

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Todd has an interesting analysis and I share his puzzlement at the strategy of being kinda sorta running in the first two states.

I do not share his puzzlement over the fund raising. The states that Rudy is counting on winning are not ones that can be won with retail politics. They are big states and require heavy advertising to reach voters which requires heavy bucks. It is almost like they are using the early states to test market their ads for the big state races.

While Todd does not mention Michigan, Dick Morris seems to think it will be a key state. It is one where Romney has some history because of his dad. It is also one that does not have a large group of Huckabee's core demographic. We need to watch to see what kind of ad commitment the candidates make in Michigan.