President Barack Obama's decision not to visit the southern U.S. border to get a first-hand view of the immigration crisis while on a fundraising trip in Texas showed a pattern that the president runs away when problems arise, said former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
"I have no objection to the president raising money. That's what presidents do," Giuliani, a Republican, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Thursday. "The problem is, what he's running away from when he does it. And there's a pattern there."
Giuliani said this tendency was also evident in the way the president handled the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. He called it a "disgrace" that Obama was not in the situation room during the 2012 attack.
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Visiting the site where a problem was taking place enabled leaders to make better decisions, because relying on what others reported might not be the complete picture, Giuliani said.
"As a leader, when you're going to be in charge of making all these decisions, if you go, there are a lot of things you find out that you don't find out by just having somebody tell you about it," Giuliani said.
On the question of leadership, the issue could be as simple as "the president wasn't prepared to be president," Giuliani said, adding Obama had no executive experience when he was elected to the office.
"It's very hard to put somebody in [the presidency] who's never had executive responsibility. Never had command. Never run a military unit, a business, a government agency. Didn't develop those skills," he said.
For the president not to visit the border and witness the effects of the influx of thousands of illegal immigrants because, Giuliani said, he "doesn't want ownership of the problem," showed Obama consistently "puts politics ahead of being president of the United States."
"You go there because you're in charge. You go there because you are going to have to make decisions, and you want the maximum amount of accurate information before you make that decision. [Obama] doesn't function that way.
"There is no level here at which he functions as a chief executive, as a substantive chief executive. He's functioning 100 percent as a politician," Giuliani said.
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