The road ahead for Mayor Giuliani is going to be a lot smoother because of his showing at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Governor Romney may have won the CPAC poll, but our Ryan Sager reports that Mr. Giuliani came in an unexpectedly strong second and even won the ballot that combined attendees’ first and second choices. It was a more important test for Mr. Giuliani. Even the ex-mayor’s inner circle felt some trepidation at the prospect of the socially liberal Mr. Giuliani walking into a room full of hundreds of conservative activists. Would he be booed? Pelted with rotten fruit?

In the event, he was greeted as a hero. He was given a lengthy and boisterous standing ovation. It shouldn’t have been surprising. Despite dire warnings from political analysts, Mr. Giuliani has polled extremely well among Republicans, including among the most right-leaning voters in the American electorate. He has established a reservoir of affection for his leadership on September 11, 2001. He is far-and-away the most accomplished conservative in the race, having led the turnaround of New York City in the 1990s through a combination of tax cuts, welfare reform, and broken-windows policing.

Appearing at CPAC gave the former mayor the opportunity to build bridges with skeptics. While Senator McCain, often at odds with the religious right in the past, has tried to make peace by pandering to social conservatives on issues such as supporting the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, Mr. Giuliani asked the audience to learn to live with differences of opinion. “My 80% ally is not my 20% enemy,” Mr. Giuliani quoted President Reagan as having said. “We don’t all see eye-to-eye on everything. … The point of a presidential election is to figure out who do you believe the most, and what do you think are the most important things for this country at a particular time.”

Even more important is that Mr. Giuliani is figuring out that it’s possible to draw a straight line from the reforms he instituted in New York to the morally healthy society that so many in the Republican Party fear is slipping away. Big-government liberalism, he argued, is what has destroyed our social fabric as much as any of the other forces of modernity. Moving people to work from welfare, rooting out the “culture of complaint” in favor of a culture of personal responsibility, restoring order to the public square — these are all reforms that can span both sides of the divide among Republicans and many others in this country.

For CPAC, the New York Times reported from Washington, Mr. Romney bused in and paid the way for supporters (many times his margin of victory). Mr. McCain stayed away entirely. Only Mr. Giuliani stood on principle and made his case. It’s still very early in this race. But the idea that Mr. Giuliani is unacceptable to the Republican Party’s conservative base died this weekend, and he can now gather speed with his formulation – articulated so well at the Hoover Institution last week – that the GOP is the party of tax cuts, parental choice in education, and a health care system rooted in free-market principles, or, as he put it, the “Party of Freedom.”