"It really does seem to me," writes Matt, "that Romney would be a less dangerous president than Mike Huckabee or John McCain or Rudy Giuliani." I don't know that I'd include Huckabee there, but it's certainly true in comparison to McCain and Giuliani. By all accounts, Romney is basically a managerial technocrat interested in finance, the economy, and related issues. Put another way, he's interested in doing bad things that largely require legislation to be enacted. This means he's subject to the checks and balances of a Democratic Congress. Giuliani and McCain, by contrast, seem to be interested in doing bad things in foreign policy, where the president has considerable autonomy to deploy fighter jets and piss off allies. A Republican interested in a neoconservative foreign policy can do much more damage than a Republican interested in conservative fiscal policy, simply because the former relies on the will of the executive while the latter requires the consent of Congress.
