Foreign policy not seen as key to White House bid

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The killing of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto sent U.S. presidential candidates scrambling to show their mastery of a foreign policy crisis.

Democrat John Edwards, former North Carolina senator, said he spoke to Pakistan's president by telephone. Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain advocated democratization, and Republicans former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney urged stepping up the fight against militants.

But expertise in world affairs is rarely key to a successful White House bid, and even after the September 11 attacks most voters focus on domestic concerns rather than foreign policies, analysts said.

Instead, voters respond to candidates' broad visions of how they would lead America in the world, analysts said, as Republican and Democrats contenders vie for their party's nomination ahead of the November 2008 presidential election.

Voters view foreign policy "in very general terms as a style of leadership, or as a way that America presents itself ... to the world," said Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center.

Recent elections show a "lack of foreign policy experience is not a deal breaker for American voters. It's less important than the character that a candidate brings," he said.

Dimock cited a standoff between Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady aspiring to be the first woman president, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, seeking to be the first black president.

The two quarreled at a debate in July over whether, if elected, they would talk directly to foreign leaders of adversary countries including North Korea and Cuba.

The debate was not so much about specifics, but an attempt to tie their approach to foreign policy to their larger message, Dimock said.

LIGHT CREDENTIALS

Most voters are comfortable that experts will counsel the president on policy details, said Brian Darling, Senate relations director at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

"Pretty much all these candidates have minimal foreign policy experience," said Darling, citing as exceptions McCain, an Arizona senator experienced in national security issues; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Joseph Biden of Delaware, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"When you are voting for a president you are voting for their judgment on foreign policy, not specific positions they have mapped out," Darling said.

Since 1980, only President George H.W. Bush could boast of an extensive foreign policy resume on the campaign trail. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had relatively light foreign policy credentials before they came to power, analysts said.

The same period is littered with candidates rejected by voters either from within their own party at primaries or in general elections despite their strong foreign policy resumes.

Republican voters ahead of next year's election cite national security, Iraq and Iran as high priorities, and a Pew Research poll of New Hampshire voters in November showed they ranked McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, as best equipped to deal with the issues.

But McCain only ranked third among those voters overall, evidence that competence in international affairs is not necessarily a decisive factor for New Hampshire Republicans, who will vote on January 8 in the state-by-state contest to select the parties' nominees.

DANGERS

America's size, history and Constitution reinforce the primacy of domestic issues to voters compared with, for example, the priorities of relatively small European states, analysts said.

U.S. politicians also usually start at the state level where they are rarely exposed to international issues, said Ken Stein, professor of Middle Eastern history and Israeli studies at Atlanta's Emory University.

Presidential candidates "by and large have a shallow or short resume when it comes to foreign affairs but that's not an aberration in terms of who we are as Americans," he said.

But Stein said there were dangers in the relative lack of world exposure of White House hopefuls, and the emphasis on domestic issues helped stifle debate on how the United States should conduct international affairs.

"It's appalling, abysmal and not a good sign that we live in this globalized world where our ... candidates for the office cannot fathom different political systems until they get exposed to it on the job," Stein said.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

(For more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)