Breaking: Bill Kristol right about something

It'll be surprising to... well, nobody, that Bill Kristol used his New York Times column today to slander various liberals and talk up various conservatives, and generally boost for John McCain without disclosing his informal advisory position* to the GOP nominee this election cycle.

But this is certainly worth considering:

Democracies don’t always elect the man who has done the most for his country.

Consider our last four presidential elections. If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H. W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military.

I think there's actually something to this, but that Kristol isn't doing his party much good by pointing it out. It's Democrats, after all, that are overly terrified about running against Republican military men. And seemingly for no good reason. As Matt Yglesias points out in his forthcoming book Heads in the Sand, there is a smart liberal approach to both the substance and politics of foreign policy, and it's compelling even when the opposition is the war party.

That's not to say that there's no political difficulty here for Democrats (our military is actually deployed in a war zone this time around, and one of the two potential Democratic nominees wisely decided to tee-up the ball for John McCain). But the cases of Bush I and Dole and Gore and Kerry show pretty clearly that having an impressive military resume doesn't fully compensate for being an uninspiring, message-less politician.