Wow, you picked on Rudy. That's sarcasm in case you didn’t notice. Echoing Andrew Sullivan's thoughts and attributing them to your blog is both disingenuous and stupid. You claim to be a social liberal but a foreign policy conservative yet when someone with similar views actually runs, you turn on him. Much like Sullivan you prefer liberal Democrats like Obama and are just not honest about your political persuasion.

Which candidate was a CEO, a governor, came from outside Washington and ran against it to get things done? Romney? No Bush. Hard to keep these distinct sometimes.

But . . . but . . . he's good at looking really serious and saying bad things about terrorists.

That's leadership, in case you didn't know.

The only way a Republican ever gets elected Mayor of New York City is if voters are convinced that the Democrats are hopelessly screwed up. A Republican's success in that environment does not lay much of a foundation for success in elections with mostly Republican voters.

Giuliani could be antagonistic personally while showing a liberal face on social issues because most New Yorkers thought the city was in pretty bad shape when he took over and blamed the Democrats -- though they didn't actually disagree with the Democrats on a lot of issues. Giuliani did a good enough job in the eyes of that constituency to get reelected. But, again, a big part of his success was voters' feeling that the Democrats would just foul things up again if they were let back into the Mayor's office.

A Presidential race is different. In place of an electorate of people made desperate by Democratic failures, Giuliani had Republican voters divided between admirers of George Bush and people who thought his time was over. He could campaign against liberals, but in GOP Presidential politics everyone campaigns against liberals. In New York City a guy can get by even if he is widely disliked (let's face it, a lot of New York City politicians are widely disliked). In Iowa and New Hampshire, not so much. And there are good reasons why no big-city mayor has ever been elected President.

The bottom line is that Giuliani was never a viable Republican Presidential candidate. He could have run a better campaign, and gotten more votes than he did. But in any other year, without the very exceptional situation created by an unpopular Republican President leaving the scene without a designated successor, all the people who talked Giuliani into running would have urged him not to. And they would have been right.

I believe America defeated the most terrible threat to its security - Giuliani.

At least in the foreign policy realm, he could only offer nightmares and terror. America did not need a fanatical like he is.

There is a tendency, especially among reporters but also among the chattering classes more generally, to believe that presidential campaigning tests the skills that will make a good president. Despite Mr. Drezner's claim here, there isn't really much evidence for this proposition. In similar contexts, where controlled (sort of) experiments are possible, similar analyses have been proven pretty much unfounded, e.g., job interviews are almost wholly ineffective in predicting job performance or identifying good job performers.