On the wall

I would be remiss if I didn't point out one paragraph in Bai's article that is an indication that, like 2000 and 2004, the candidates' caricatures have already been limned.

Giuliani had read his history, and this was the lesson he had taken away. Both Churchill and Reagan had fused a fundamental shift in thinking to sheer force of personality, but to Giuliani, the policy was the personality. The moment didn’t call for some new approach to combating terrorism; what America needed, instead, was a wartime personality who was ready, like Churchill and Reagan, to stride into history and firmly establish the nation’s resolve in the eyes of the world. None of the other potential commanders in chief in either party had saved a fallen city or been knighted by the queen of England. It was hard to picture Mitt Romney holed up in a London bunker with his generals while the bombs fell all around him, or Barack Obama demanding that the Soviets tear down that wall. Giuliani came with no such mental limitation. His “Churchillian moment” was less about the substance of governing than about the image most Americans had of him — and, maybe more to the point, the image he has of himself.

Right. Bai helpfully concludes for us that Romney is craven and fearful and Obama couldn't face down the Soviets. Like Reagan did.

Ok.

But yeah, I can picture Giuliani "on the wall," as Bai puts it earlier in the piece. But it's an image that's hardly "Churchillian."