Here’s your Quote of the Day, from Rudy Giuliani, speaking in 1994:

Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

That’s ass-backward in so many ways one barely knows where, or whether, to begin.

I’m just back from a quick trip to Iowa, where Mitt Romney won the big Repug straw poll yesterday. My friend T.M. Lindsey of the Iowa Independent calls it “the Mitt Romney Ames Straw Poll,” given that Mitt essentially paid the expenses for the whole thing. This puts Romney in the driver’s seat at the moment, but there’s a spectacularly long way to go before votes that matter are cast. (You could ask a former governor of Vermont about that.) Campaign watchers down there have good things to say about Mike Huckabee, who gets a bigger boost from finishing second than Romney gets for winning. Even Democrats like Huckabee, at least a little. One I talked to this weekend said, “It would be nice to have a Republican candidate I could respect.” I saw a national-TV talking head this morning suggesting that the straw poll result meant the end for Tom Tancredo, which seems ridiculous, given the razor-thin margin by which he lost to Sam Brownback in the straw poll—their dukeout for the right-wing nutcase vote isn’t over yet at all. Ron Paul’s fifth-place finish may have surprised the national talking heads, but it was no surprise to people watching the campaign down there. Nobody was taking him seriously a few months ago, but he is clearly a serious candidate now. His campaign is quietly becoming the 2008 answer to Howard Dean’s in 2004—web-based, insurgent, and increasingly successful at shaking things up.

Iowa during the caucus campaign is a traditionally a place where you find candidates on your back porch waiting when you take out the garbage in the morning, and if you follow the campaign from a distance, you may get the impression that the state is boiling hot with politics these days. I didn’t get that sense on our drive this morning through our old haunts in and around Iowa City. (We lived there from 1997 to 2000.) I was surprised at how few campaign signs there were—I saw one for Hillary, one for Biden, and one for Obama, but that was it. I didn’t see any GOP signs at all, but I didn’t expect to. They don’t call it “the People’s Republic of Johnson County” for nothing.

Neither Rudy nor John McCain entered the straw poll, and their results (8th place and 10th place, behind unannounced candidate Fred Thompson) show it. Giuliani’s strength in Iowa, whatever it is right now, seems to be based largely on name recognition—I’ve got to believe that the more people learn about him, the less likely they will be to support him. (Wide dissemination of quotes like the one with which we began would certainly help.) There’s been a spate of stories lately about “the real Rudy”—like the Rocky Mountain Chronicle piece that includes Giuliani’s “freedom is slavery” quote above, or the August cover story in Harper’s, which suggests that President Giuliani would be “A Fate Worse Than Bush.” Hard as that is to imagine, I’d say it’s probably true.

(This post has been edited since it first appeared.)