Its tough to run for president--everything you ever did or said is examined and found fault with. What you haven't done or said is also a vulnerability. Occasionally a candidate does something so foolish that it entirely derails the campaign. John Kerry's clumsy remarks about how poor scholastic performance could result in someone ending up in Iraq as a soldier are a case in point. Kerry's campaign was DOA.

Has Rudy Giuliani, the current Republican so-called frontrunner, mortally wounded his own campaign?

Fred Kaplan writes a pretty devastating criticism of Giuliani being AWOL from the Iraq study group, and while it hasn't yet received a lot of traction, its an arrow to the heart of the Giuliani campaign.

If you don't read Newsday, you might not know (I didn't until this week) that Rudy Giuliani was an original member of the Iraq Study Group—the blue-ribbon commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton—but he was forced out after failing to show up for any of the panel's meetings.

The day after the Newsday story appeared, Giuliani explained that he'd started thinking about running for president, and his presence on the panel might give it a political spin. "It didn't seem that I'd really be able to keep the thing focused on a bipartisan, nonpolitical resolution," he said.

The more likely reason for Giuliani's no-shows is much plainer—money. Craig Gordon, the Newsday reporter who wrote the story in the Long Island paper's June 19 edition, discovered that on the three days of meetings that Giuliani missed (before quitting), he was out of town, delivering highly lucrative speeches.

On April 12, 2006, he was giving a keynote address at an economics conference in South Korea for a fee of $200,000. On May 18, he was giving a speech on leadership in Atlanta for $100,000.

At that point, Baker gave Giuliani an ultimatum: Start showing up for sessions, or quit. On May 24, he quit, noting in a letter (provided to Gordon) that prior commitments prevented him from giving the panel his "full and active participation." (He was replaced by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, a puzzling choice for the job; maybe he was the only public figure Baker could find on such short notice. According to someone I know who attended one session, the elderly Meese "was barely conscious.")

Meanwhile, Giuliani was raking in exorbitant speaking fees around this time—according to Gordon, $11.4 million in the course of 14 months, $1.7 million for 20 speeches during the monthlong period that coincided with the Baker-Hamilton sessions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I doubt that I would have forgone six figures of easy income for the privilege of yakking about Iraq with a roomful of graybeards all day long. Then again, I wasn't about to run for president—the highest office of public service—on a résumé bereft of a single foreign-policy credential.

Rudy's choice—to go for the money—speaks proverbial volumes about his priorities.

Kaplan's criticism appears picayune, even to someone like me who isn't particularly enamored with Rudy Giuliani. Its doubtful that money was a motivation since he doesn't lack for opportunities to give highly-compensated speeched. In fact, the Iraq Study Group gig might well have boosted demand for his insights.

It seems more likely that Giuliani saw the ISG as too much of a policy commitment in an ambiguous situation. There is a reason they stock these panels with old political war horses--Lee Hamilton and James Baker are out of the game. They neither gain or lose from whatever positions they end up taking. For Rudy though, what might have looked like an opportunity to pad the resume might well end up an anchor around his neck. In hindsight, that is precisely how it turned out. The ISG report was roundly panned by nearly everyone.

Still, the story reveals a considerable flaw in candidate Giuliani which Kaplan illustrated rather well.

The fact is, Giuliani has no idea what he's talking about. On the campaign trail he says that the terrorist threat "is something I understand better than anyone else running for president." As the mayor of New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, he may have lived more intimately with the consequences of terrorism, but this has no bearing on his inexperience or his scant insight in the realm of foreign policy. He is, in fact, that most dangerous would-be world leader: a man who doesn't seem to know how much he doesn't know.

McCain wants to stay the course. Romney is articulating a comprehensive strategy. Giuliani has no policy.

Ultimately, the Giuliani campaign appears to have miscalculated, believing that Rudy's terrorism credentials were unassailable, but strength isn't going to be enough in this campaign--people want a problem-solver.