Look to the Consiglieri

Since so much of a presidential election, especially its primary phase, consists largely in bickering over low-substance, conceptually confused disputes like which candidate is the true "change-agent" (or on the Republican side, who's a "consistent conservative"), it's difficult to get a sound intuitive hook onto what sort of president a particular candidate would make simply by looking at the foreground of his or her campaign. A much better procedure, surely, is to look at the policy team each candidate has assembled — one doesn't, for example, choose a foreign policy advisor without both knowing and concurring with the prospective advisor's view.

So one of the biggest reasons I'm supporting Obama is that he hired Samantha Power as a consultant on foreign affairs and picked Austin Goolsbee to head his economic policy shop. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won the Pollack-O'Hanlon primary. Also, anybody who would pay Mark Penn for anything other than donating his ample adipose deposits for industrial uses is highly suspect.

Likewise, a decent prima facie indicator that Rudy Giuliani's feral foreign policy pronouncements are more than just tactical positioning, and reflect his real beliefs, is that he's taking advice from Stormin' Norman Podhoretz. Helpfully confirming the fact that Giuliani is a dangerous loon, his chief foreign policy advisor, Charles Hill, is unveiling the Giuliani four-point plan for permanent war as an end in itself. (N.B.: Giuliani is not focusing exclusively on what he calls "the terrorists' war on us," pace Eli Lake. He is focusing exclusively on what he calls "The Terrorists' War on Us.")

Charles Hill is a former George Schultz advisor whose most significant contribution to statecraft was some minor obstruction of justice in the Iran-Contra investigations. (Hence the unintentional irony in the title of the execrable, hero-worshipping Hill biography, The Man on Whom Nothing was Lost, written by a cultish former student of his.) Despite a complete dearth of scholarly accomplishments, Hill has a sinecure at Yale as its Diplomat-in-Residence, from which perch he wags his tongue at Paul Kennedy on the need to consult Dante in crafting 21st century foreign policy, and (to pick another debate I was witness to) lectures Seyla Benhabib on the timeline of a middle Eastern history that exists only in his head.

So there you have it: If you're looking for a candidate who will commit actual military resources to an open-ended war on abstractions, count nouns, and literary tropes, Rudy's your man. Who wants to sign up to be a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms of one?