So they’re strong on foreign policy, except insofar as it involves actual policy. They tend to be much better, however, at comparing themselves to figures such as Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln. They make such comparisons incessantly. Last week, Giuliani said that Lincoln had “that ability that a leader has–a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan–to look into the future.” ~Jonathan Chait

So Mr. Bush can both see into men’s souls and see into the future?  The list of his impressive powers just keeps getting longer and longer.  But I do have a question: if Lincoln could see into the future, why did it take him so long to promote Grant? 

There have been a couple of people on the left who have seen through the “Giuliani has national security credentials” smokescreen his boosters and credulous pundits have been throwing up to distract voters from the candidate’s myriad flaws.  Matt Yglesias wrote two and a half years ago:

He’s never served in the military (or held a civilian job that entailed working with the military). He’s never held a job dealing with foreign affairs. He’s never held a job dealing with intelligence. Indeed, the closest he gets is time spent as a federal prosecutor working against the Mafia, precisely the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism that the nation has abandoned and that the Bush administration likes to accuse Democrats of being in thrall to. Nor does he have any experience with the problem of post-conflict stabilization, the area in which George W. Bush’s policies have most clearly fallen short.

In other words, Giuliani has no foreign policy or national security policy experience that should give him an advantage over any governor or any other mayor around the country.  Even among the current candidates coming out of state and local government, Giuliani is particularly lacking in these areas.  It is demonstrably true that he is far less qualified to be President than, say, Bill Richardson–consider that horrifying statement about the state of our presidential field for a moment–which ought to be virtually disqualifying for him as a candidate.  If the public doesn’t care whether the next President has any experience in relevant fields related to the looming problems of the next administration, I guess Giuliani’s image as a Brooklyn heavy and vindictive prosecutor will do.  Yet his rather remarkable lack of expertise in national security and foreign policy is all the more damning for him when it is his “leadership” in these areas that is supposedly going to offset his social liberalism and sketchy personal life.  If cleaning up Time Square, reducing crime and getting rid of the “squeegee men” are his signature accomplishments, I do fail to see how he is prepared to head the executive branch of government in wartime, especially when many of our alliances are in poor shape and our international relations are almost uniformly bad.   

Then again, I don’t know why someone whose chief accomplishments in foreign relations (very broadly defined) include denying security to the former President of Iran and organising the Olympics is today regarded as anything other than an amusing curiosity in an election that will focus on foreign policy questions.  If his record is anything to go by (and with Romney, we can’t exactly be sure of that!), Romney will respond to a foreign crisis by refusing police escorts to the political leadership of the other country and will then cut back on all that wasteful expenditure at state dinners by making everyone eat pizza off of paper plates.  He will also make very loud speeches threatening divestment.  That will break the Taliban’s will to fight!    

In fact, given his impressive lack of any relevant experience, Giuliani is a sort of latter-day Colonel Johnson, whose chief claim to fame and really his only qualification for being nominated as the 1836 Vice Presidential candidate was the claim (probably spurious) that he killed the Indian chief Tecumseh.  You all remember the winning slogan, don’t you?  “Rumpsy Dumpsy, Rumpsy Dumpsy, Colonel Johnson shot Tecumseh!”  Giuliani needs the consultants that the Colonel had.  In fairness to the Colonel, he was at least present at the right battle, so it is possible that he could have done what others claimed for him.  There is really no such plausible explanation, except apparently the desperation of the GOP establishment, for the building up of Giuliani into a leader on national security issues. 

Chait is right about the tendency of many Republican pols to strike the Churchillian pose (Santorum was only the most recent and most flamboyantly silly of these).  It is a strange habit to have.  I understand that each time a Republican invokes old Winnie he believes he is somehow partaking of the man’s glorified reputation, but more often the Churchill references (which Giuliani makes as often as possible) can only serve to remind the listener of the rather sizeable gap between the grand old man and the speaker.  I am hardly what you would call a Churchill fan.  The fetish Americans on the right have for him is weird and disturbing to me (only slightly less disturbing than the Tony Blair fetish many of the same people have).  Nonetheless, a modern pol who wants to give a boost to his own reputation for leadership by saying, “I like Churchill” as many times as possible can only suffer by the inevitable comparison between the two, since Churchill was nothing if not a very experienced foreign policy hand by the time he took over the Government.  In fairness to him, even the disaster of Gallipoli (Churchill’s idea) could be laid at the feet of the dithering naval commander on the scene.  As a strategist, Churchill occasionally had good instincts.  The point is that Churchill had at least been around the block in making and thinking about policy in some capacity before he became a wartime leader. 

You can spot the candidates who have scarcely given these problems much thought at all by their reflexive, unthinking genuflections before the image of Churchill.  Those are the candidates you don’t want within a mile of important policy decisions.  (That goes for the top three on the Democratic side, too, while we’re at it.)