Not that we really need to revisit this cudgel-issue of which candidate has more endorsements of foreign leaders, but on this issue pundits have shortchanged the incumbent.

Those who claim that Kerry has a lock on the support of foreign leaders have, rather unfairly, lumped all foreign leaders together into one pool, rather than dividing them into different subsets and weighting them accordingly. The issue is sort of like that raised by Ruy Teixeira about public opinion polls which have oversampled Republican voters.

If you take this more specific view, you see that among those foreign leaders President Bush has himself appointed to office his rate of support runs extremely high -- probably approaching 100%.