Michael Crowley seems to be forgetting something:

But Romney also brings an unusually skimpy foreign policy background for a GOP nominee. The last GOP candidate with so little experience in foreign affairs was Ronald Reagan in 1980 [bold mine-DL], but at least the Gipper had a history of fervent anti-Communism.

If Crowley meant to say that Reagan was the last Republican nominee with relatively little direct foreign policy experience running against an incumbent President, he would be right. Of course, the comparison with Reagan isn’t as encouraging as the Romney campaign would like. Reagan had spent a fair amount of time thinking about foreign policy issues before his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, and Romney seems to have spent almost no time learning about these issues. Reagan was running against an incumbent whose foreign policy record was a political liability, and Romney is challenging an incumbent whose record is mostly an advantage. What Crowley strangely fails to mention is that there was a much more recent Republican nominee without foreign policy experience. As we all know, that was George W. Bush in 2000.

Prior to Romney, Bush was the last Republican nominee with so little foreign policy experience. Like Romney, Bush seemed to have given very little thought to these issues before starting his presidential bid. Romney is arguably worse than Bush in this respect because he has been more or less continuously seeking the Presidency since 2006. It’s not a surprise that a sitting governor would pay relatively little attention to foreign affairs, but it’s a different story for someone who has been out of office since early 2007 and spent much of the time since then as a presidential candidate. Bizarrely, Crowley avoids mentioning Bush’s name all together. There is no acknowledgment that two-thirds of Romney’s advisers are Bush administration veterans, or that Romney’s “anything but Obama” positioning and his selection of foreign policy advisers imply a return to Bush-era policies.

Having said that, I’m not sure that Romney has the “Commander-in-Chief problem” that Crowley suggests. Republican and movement conservative reaction to his VFW speech has generally been positive when it hasn’t been glowing. If Jonathan Bernstein is right that “foreign policy talk, even more than any other policy talk, should be targeted squarely at elites,” Romney’s obvious weakness on foreign policy may not be as much of a problem as one might think. Republican and movement conservative elites are generally satisfied with what Romney is saying, and I suspect that these are the elites that Republican and Republican-leaning independents listen to, so it is doubtful that Romney’s lack of experience and knowledge will cost him that much in terms of electoral support.

In almost any other election cycle, it would cost him support. It should cost him, but Romney is fortunate to be running in a year when foreign policy is unusually unimportant to the overwhelming majority of voters. The same Pew survey that showed Romney to be at an eight-point disadvantage on “making wise foreign policy decisions” also found that just 7% of respondents rated different foreign issues as “the most important problem facing the country.” Romney’s weakness on foreign policy is unlikely to be a significant factor in the election for the same reason that it is a waste of his time to go overseas to build his credibility on these issues.