In two words - winging it. Loved this:
At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity. When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once visited’’ with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ross makes a useful distinction between being qualified for the presidency and being prepared for it. I guess if you put Gaffney in the Pentagon and Haass at State, you'd have a pretty good successor to the incoherence of the Bush administration. But hey, he's a believer! What else do you want?