The dyspeptic, “not afraid to suggest his opponents have really deep-seated psychological problems” Republican mayor of fact and legend has taken a holiday. What’s left on the presidential campaign trail is a commanding daddy of a candidate, a disciplined fellow who talks about terrorism and fiscal order and about terrorism some more.

Mr. Giuliani laughs, he gestures expansively, he even pokes fun at his tendency to wax a wee bit authoritarian. (He suggests a touch of the cane was necessary to impose discipline on that liberal asylum known as New York.) He shakes hands with reporters he once viewed as “jerky” and assures them he is fine with tough questions about abortion, where he has settled on a position supporting a woman’s right to choose, and about gun control, where is he at least halfway into a policy back-flip.

He has not sanded down all his edges. At Oglethorpe University here, where he met with 200 voters, he does not hesitate to challenge that woman who asks about jihad. But he does so in a fashion that leaves her ambulatory.

“They hate you,” he says of the Islamic terrorists, bringing his hands up to his chest. “They don’t want you to be in this college, or you, or you — —.”

Mr. Giuliani wheels around and points toward another middle-aged woman in the front row, who looks momentarily startled. “And you can’t wear that outfit because you’re showing your arms.”

“This is reality, ma’am,” he continues, his voice streaked with just a touch of exasperation. “This isn’t me making it up. I saw reality after 9/11. You’ve got to clear your head.”

His answer meets with sustained applause.

[...]

“Right now, as we sit here enjoying breakfast, they are planning on coming here to kill us,” he warns them. “I don’t blame people for not getting it before 9/11. But I do blame people who don’t get it now.”

If Hillary Rodham Clinton is the nurturer warrior and Barack Obama the college idealist and John McCain the tough but irreverent flyboy, then Mr. Giuliani is the father, the talk-tough-on-terror, I’m-comfortable-wielding-authority guy.

In dress, he plays to type. Other candidates go open-necked or pull flannel shirts out of the closet for New Hampshire.

Not the former mayor. He dresses in the one-size-too-large suits he has favored since his days as a federal prosecutor, with the top shirt button fastened and tie knotted tight. It is difficult to imagine anyone asking him a “really dopey” (two favorite Giuliani words now in abeyance) question about his favored style in underwear, as someone once did of Bill Clinton.

For all the Beltway chatter that Mr. Giuliani’s moderation on abortion renders him radioactive for the evangelicals who inhabit the core of the Republican Party, the former mayor attracts little verbal buckshot. More often, the image that comes to mind as Mr. Giuliani traipses into a string of packed, applauding rooms in Alabama, Georgia and New Hampshire is of a rock star, if that rocker happened to be a balding and slightly hunched former mayor.

In Atlanta, Mr. Giuliani offers to take questions, and a stout blond woman in a red pantsuit shoots straight up, raising her hand and nearly shouting, “I think you are sooooo handsome.”

Ideological consistency is not Mr. Giuliani’s groove; leadership and destiny are. So is self-assurance. Ask Mr. Giuliani how to impose fiscal discipline on Washington, and he notes: “I’m an expert at it.” Mention New York and he says: “The turnaround was massive, palpable; nobody can really deny it.” Quiz him about presidential qualifications, and he says that there is no way to prepare, but that “being mayor of New York” comes as close as it gets.

As for terror, “I understand terrorism in a way that is equal to or exceeds anyone else,” Mr. Giuliani says.

Mr. Giuliani will drop a self-deprecating joke. When annoyance tickles at the back of his spine, he has learned to smile rather than scowl. But he suffers no deficit of self-confidence.