Team Romney has its second new ad of the day firing off in Iowa. It’s a contrast with Huckabee this time around, making the rather obvious point that Romney is more ready to be president than Huckabee (so am I, for that matter, if you go by what Huckabee actually says most of the time). Earlier, they released a contrast with McCain to run in New Hampshire since he’s surging there. Not a bad ad, though it probably falls in the “negative” category that hardly anyone but the chattering class actually frets about. I certainly don’t care if an ad is “negative” as long as it’s factual. Tell me bad things about the other guy, tell me the world is falling apart and you can fix it, just don’t tell me lies.

More: Romney may be more ready than Huckabee — which isn’t saying much — but he still needs to do some studying. By the time Reagan was elected president in 1980, he had spent decades thinking, writing and speaking on the Communist threat. By 1980 he had a pretty good idea how to defeat it. He was, contrary to what Romney said on NBC this morning, a foreign policy expert.

CURRY: Most analysts would say, governor, that the events of yesterday will help your chief opponents Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. Are you concerned, are you worried that your impact, that your campaign will be impacted negatively?

ROMNEY: Oh, I think we have to put the events of the world at a higher level than thinking about local politics. But I do believe as well that people recognize that what we want in a leader is a person who can actually guide America in a very challenging time. You look back to the — one of the great foreign policy leaders of our nation was Ronald Reagan. He was a governor, not a so-called foreign policy expert. He was a person who knew how to make difficult decisions and how to lead in times of crisis. And I think if you look at my life’s experience you’ll recognize that’s what I bring to the table.

We’re currently facing a threat that’s not all that similar to the Communist threat, but it will take similar close and patient study and long-term strategic thinking to find ways to defeat it. I don’t see any evidence that any of the candidates have cracked a book on the subject, or have studied how Reagan defeated the last threat.