Even in the sea of speculation and preemptive attacks on Mayor Giuliani’s future political career, somehow the biggest news on this front in the past week seems to have been missed by many prognosticators.

On Wednesday it was announced that Rudolph Giuliani will be joining the powerful Texas law firm Bracewell & Patterson as a partner to coincide with their new opening of a New York office. The firm will be renamed Bracewell & Giuliani.

Mr. Giuliani’s consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, has successfully lassoed many big name clients since it was formed three years ago, but the primary benefits of this particular deal are more political than financial.

This merger effectively announces an alliance between some of the most eminent Texas friends of the Bush family and the Brooklyn-born, Reagan-era U.S. attorney, Mr. Giuliani.

The managing partner of Bracewell & Patterson is Patrick Oxford. His relationship with the Bush family goes back to 1970 when he volunteered on George H.W. Bush’s U.S. Senate campaign. He is both a close friend and contemporary of Karl Rove in terms of their decades of service alongside two generations of the Bush family in the rough and tumble of Texas politics.

Like many successful attorneys, Mr. Oxford seems largely content to wield influence outside of the spotlight, but his reach is real. The book “Election 2004: How Bush-Cheney Won and What You Can Expect in the Future” by Evan Thomas and the staff of Newsweek explains Mr. Oxford’s pivotal influence in the closing days of that tight campaign when he oversaw a 1,500-member Republican volunteer organization known as the Mighty Texas Strike Force.

This team would deploy groups of 10 Texas based campaign workers to any pivotal battleground state in order shore up support and help coordinate the election effort with communications, logistics, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Mr. Oxford, 62, is a master of the political ground game in local and national campaigns. “This is not my first rodeo” he is quoted as saying.

Now Mr. Giuliani is standing at the gates of the rodeo. This alliance with a long-time Bush ally in the heart of red-state America should quiet some of the persistent rumors that Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with the Bush administration was deeply harmed by the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security.

One of the persistent conspiracy theories surrounding that incident, recently repeated by New York magazine, was that Karl Rove in a grand Machiavellian gesture set up the Kerik nomination to fail intentionally, hoping to embarrass Mr. Giuliani and take some of the luster off his 2008 front-runner status, which continues to be confirmed by virtually all polls.

The theory had many flaws right from the get-go, most notably that it required Mr. Rove to cut off his nose to spite his face, and distract coverage of President Bush in the weeks before a second inauguration. This new alliance is evidence that these relationships remain strong.

In addition, it was little noted, but not insignificant, that the president’s ultimate pick to serve as Homeland Security chief – the accomplished Judge Michael Chertoff – first rose to public prominence as a mafia prosecutor in Mr. Giuliani’s U.S. Attorney office.

Even at this early date, a combination of far-right social conservatives and left-leaning opposition researchers is trafficking in rumors designed to derail any possible future presidential campaign from Mr. Giuliani because they fear the general election strength and ideological implications of such a candidacy.

Not since General Dwight D. Eisenhower eyed a run for the presidency on the Republican line in 1952 has a draft movement been accompanied by as desperate an effort to derail its prospects. Professional partisans are embracing a smear campaign designed to portray the more popular alternative as insufficiently right-wing.

Today’s attempted hit-jobs are cloaked in more contemporary arguments: whispers about a wedge between the White House and one of its chief surrogates from the 2004 campaign; a cheap desire to play up “red” and “blue” state divides with the argument that rural Republicans will never accept a New York City mayor – no matter how tough he was on crime or how much he cut taxes – as their standard bearer.

But these attacks seem like ideological wishful thinking; they keep running up against reality and the fact of the former mayor’s broad national popularity. No past presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower was named Time’s “Man of the Year” before reaching office, and while Mr. Giuliani’s future political plans are far from finally decided, whenever I travel around the South and West, Republicans’ reaction to the former mayor primarily range from fascination to admiration. If pre-emptive critics hope to pressure Mr. Giuliani into backing down from a challenge, they have badly misjudged the man.

This newly announced Rudy-Texas alliance should help quiet critics’ desperate drumbeats for the time being. It is yet another example of how Mr. Giuliani continues to resonate in the heartland of America, both in red states and blue. And even as semi-organized fringe groups attempt to fire shots across his bow out of fear, while they try to divide to conquer, he is busy building bridges. One of the most significant efforts to date was established this week. It is more evidence that Mr. Giuliani can play in the red states. He can ride in the rodeo.