In the last presidential campaign, Republicans delighted in attacking John Kerry as a flip-flopper. They took every effort by Kerry to explain his voting record and turned it into a crude somersault. The fact that he was both for and against the war was the biggest laugh line of all.

Now the joke’s on them. Mitt Romney makes Kerry look like a model of consistency. Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to have it both ways make Kerry seem like a man of uncommon fortitude. Is this the best Republicans can do?

Appearing on Larry King Live, former New York City Mayor and longtime abortion rights supporter Rudy Giuliani refused to say whether it would bother him if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I don’t think it would hurt me or help me,” he said.

Given his age and gender, that is both true and beside the point. Abortion is not a pressing issue for 60-year-old men, speaking personally, but it is an important issue for the Supreme Court and for many voters. Was he really trying to say he didn’t care?

“It would be a matter of states making decisions.” What decisions? Asked whether his recent stated preference for “strict constructionists” as judicial appointees meant that he would be picking those who do not support Roe, Rudy was even more obtuse: “I don’t know that. You don’t know that.”

So what does he know?

What is his point in invoking “strict construction” as a standard for judges? If it doesn’t mean no Roe, what does it mean? Whatever you want?

Imagine if Republicans were to catch Hillary playing these kinds of games. They’d eat her for lunch, claiming she was avoiding tough questions; that she would say anything, believed in nothing, cared about no one.

Et tu, Rudy?

At least Mitt Romney has owned up to changing his positions on abortion and gay rights now that he’s changed the audience of potential voters who will decide his fate. You can accuse him of opportunism, but at least you know where he stands. Not so the former mayor.

Mr. Giuliani sells himself as a tough guy, a straight shooter, the crime fighter who led New York out of the darkness. But ducking and weaving on issues that many people care passionately about – even if he doesn’t – is hardly the modus operandi of a straight-shooting tough guy. It insults people on all sides of the issue.

Nor has the former New York mayor found his footing in dealing with the war. John Kerry’s efforts to put himself on both sides might have been a laugh line, but what about Rudy’s?

Last year, Giuliani was unrelenting in arguing that Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq did not understand the war on terror. Now the former mayor is taking on nation-building and claiming the Bush administration didn’t know how to wage the war the right way. “I would remove Saddam Hussein again,” he told Larry King. “I just hope we’d do it better and we’d do it in a different way.”

Same war only better and different? Come again?

“There was a real doubt as to whether we could do this nation-building,” he said of the effort to rebuild Iraq, and “we’re not going to do it.” So what are we going to do?

Plainly, Rudy isn’t ready to answer. “I’m running,” he told King, as he had implied to Sean Hannity last week. King pressed, “Do you make a formal announcement, or is this it here, right now?” The former mayor’s response? “I guess you do one of these things where you do it four times or five times in a day.”

Is Rudy above such mundane matters as having a platform and positions on issues, not to mention having to make a major speech?

Rudy is in, but he isn’t really running, at least not yet. He’s playing. The only question is how long this game will last.

John Kerry’s efforts to put himself on both sides might have been a laugh line, but what about Rudy’s?

Susan Estrich is a syndicated columnist and author.