Rudy Giuliani said the nation will be safer under a Republican President because Democrats don't understand the threat, and that we would be at greater risk for another major attack. Predictably, the leading Democratic candidates disagree, as Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:

Democratic presidential candidates on Wednesday rebuked Republican rival Rudy Giuliani for suggesting that the United States could face another major terrorist attack if a Democrat is elected in 2008. The former New York mayor did not back down.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama said Giuliani, who was in office on Sept. 11, 2001, should not be making the terrorist threat into "the punchline of another political attack."

"Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics," Obama said in a statement.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said Giuliani knows better than to suggest there is a "superior Republican way to fight terrorism." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said protecting the country from terrorism "shouldn't be a political football."

"It should be a solemn responsibility that all of us pledge to fulfill regardless of what party we're in," she said when asked about her fellow New Yorker's comment at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Giuliani stood by his comments Wednesday, saying Democrats don't understand the threat posed by terrorists.

"They do not seem to get the fact that there are people, terrorists in this world, really dangerous people that want to come here and kill us," Giuliani said on "The Sean Hannity Show," according to a transcript distributed by his campaign. "They want to take us back to not being as alert which to me will just extend this war much, much longer."

Read the whole article at the link above. Naturally, the Democrats don't see their full-scale turn-tail-and-run policy in Iraq as showing weakness to the terrorists - no matter how many times the terrorists point it out.

Rudy is catching major flak in the media and from Democrats on this issue, which indicates he has hit a nerve. He joins John McCain in making sure the Democrats take responsibility for their policy of retreat and defeat, and the Democrats just don't like that.

The bottom line is the difference in approach between the parties. The Democrats tend to view terrorism as a law enforcement issue - the same policy, by the way, which led us to 9/11. Republicans see it as a war because they believe the repeated statements of the terrorists who see it the same way. There can be no reconciliation between these two outlooks, and this will therefore be at the forefront of the 2008 campaign. It almost doesn't matter at all who the respective nominees are: the Democrats aren't going to nominate anyone who takes a strong approach to fighting terrorism and the Republicans won't nominate anyone who does not.