Opinion: News shocker! Rudy and Hillary agree on one thing

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This just in. Despite weeks of sniping at each other across barbed wire party lines, national presidential front-runners Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton agree on one thing: Barack Obama is a naive young fellow when it comes to foreign policy. (The other agreement is that a New Yorker should become president.)

The former New York mayor is on ‘Political Capital with Al Hunt’ this weekend and was chuckling over Obama’s idea of using economic incentives and possible membership in the World Trade Organization as incentives to get Iran to negotiate over abandoning its nuclear weapons program.

‘This may be one of the few areas in which I agree with Hillary Clinton,’ Giuliani said, ‘that Barack Obama in this area shows a great deal of – a great deal of inexperience and very, very naïve. This is like, you know, begging your enemy to negotiate with you. You don’t beg your enemy to negotiate with you; you change the leverage.’

Obama, his supporters no doubt recall, was also criticized when he said that as president he’d meet with despots without preconditions and when he suggested unilaterally bombing our ally Pakistan if it didn’t cooperate in routing al Qaeda from isolated frontier areas.

Giuliani added, ‘They totally misunderstand what Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan didn’t beg the Soviets to negotiate with us; Ronald Reagan changed the leverage; he changed the power position. Barack Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to do that. I mean, it’s sad actually. He’s, like, fallen all over himself begging to negotiate with Ahmadinejad.’

In case you didn’t get what Giuliani was not exactly hinting at, he added, ‘And what Barack is trying to do is really naïve. You know, beg a terrorist supporter to come and negotiate with you.’

(UPDATE: Late today Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who thinks a Chicagoan should be president, fired back: ‘It’s time for tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, not lectures from a Mayor who skipped out on the Iraq Study Group to give paid speeches, and who was naive and irresponsible enough to recommend someone with ties to convicted felons for Secretary of Homeland Security.’)

The Bloomberg program is broadcast tonight at 8 Pacific time on, not too surprisingly, Bloomberg Television, which, along with the E! Network, rebroadcasts it many times over the weekend, when you really should be reading this non-naive blog.

--Andrew Malcolm