This stuck me as a very good point by New York native (and endlessly annoying Park Slope partisan) Badler:
Also, while governing a global city like New York may give you some foreign policy experience, it is only worth bragging about if you were successful in your dealings with your diverse constituents. One need look no farther than Giuliani's clunky handling of the murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York police officers, and the way it enraged immigrant communities across the city, to see that Giuliani is no diplomat.
Too often, Giuliani's prickly, stubborn, autocratic tendencies are taken as mere personal eccentricities, evidence that he's unpleasant rather than predictors of performance. But, in fact, when under pressure, he's shown a willingness to needlessly enrage and aggravate important, offended constituencies, which isn't the sort of tendency you want in a president who has to calm international crises.
This sort of relates to the Richardson talk from earlier today. On one hand, you have a popular, internationally experience candidate with a proven ability to pull of remarkable diplomatic feats. On the other, you've got a prickly eccentric whose descent into unpopularity was interrupted by a massive terrorist attack, who has no actual foreign policy or national security experience, and whose actual record doesn't suggest he'd be very good at either. Yet the stubborn novice is trailed by cameras while the old hand can't get a quote.
