Meet Rudolph the Redneck Vote-Hunter *

YULEE, Fla. -- Rudy Giuliani's black SUV stirred up a cloud of dust as it raced along the twisting dirt roads to the hunting lodge at the Wild Creek Safari Club.

This is not the Florida pictured in travel brochures. The hunting lodge sits a few hundred yards from the border of Georgia, and the churchgoing people who come here speak with thick Southern accents you'd never hear in Miami.

For Giuliani, it is not a natural fit. But he's come here because Florida is now the only hope he has to rescue a campaign that seems to be slipping from his grasp.

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And yet, despite campaigning here for weeks and spending most of his money here, Rudy is losing ground. In the last month, polls have shown him losing his lead in Florida as independent voters have shifted toward Sen. John McCain.

Which explains why Rudy, in a region of Florida where kids learn to hunt before they learn to drive, was pretending to be a friend of the National Rifle Association.

Pause here for a reality check. This is a guy who supported every gun control idea when he was mayor. Federal testing and licensing for all gun owners. The Brady Bill. A ban on assault weapons. He even filed a pioneering lawsuit against gun manufacturers in an attempt to limit the supply of new weapons rolling off their factory floors.

The remarkable thing is that he seemed to have this crowd in his grasp. At every stop in a recent trek across Florida's Panhandle, people said Rudy is a personal hero to them for showing such steady nerve after the 9/11 attacks. Everyone knows about his remarkable success in New York, whether fighting street violence or evicting the pornographers from Times Square.