Matt Yglesias says he finds himself struggling to "convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy." As I've watched the Giuliani campaign build a foreign policy team, it's occurred to me that the easiest way to understand the entire Giuliani phenomenon is that he is the candidate of The New York Sun: culturally moderate, reasonably sophisticated, socially tolerant, and a far-right Zionist hawk on matters Middle Eastern. If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nod and Giuliani the G.O.P. one, contest 2008 is going to be a fight to the death between the political philosophies exemplified by The New York Times editorial board versus the ones held by The New York Sun. One would hope that would go about as well as the New York newspaper war between those two papers, but ultimately I suspect it will be the too-sophisticated for the base cultural attitudes of Giuliani's advisors that will cause him the most trouble, rather than their warmongering. Josh Marshall has more.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
