Sen. Sam Brownback, speaking in Merrimack, yesterday jabbed at President Bush and two Republican rivals, saying the presidency isn't a foreign policy classroom.

Brownback, a former chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, was referring to former Republican governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In the process, he also took a jab at the man they all seek to replace, former Texas governor George W. Bush.

"I really believe this next president needs to go in with knowledge on foreign policy and not learn it on the job," said the Kansas senator, a vocal activist against the genocide in Darfur. "We have a tendency to elect governors as president because people like executive experience. I don't have any problem with that. The problem is most governors don't have foreign policy experience."

Brownback's comments were targeted largely against chief rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. The two have scuffled in recent week over social and political policy. Brownback has been fiercely critical of Romney's changed position on abortion, again yesterday telling New Hampshire's WKXL-FM that Romney "hasn't been consistent on these positions in the past. He's stated that himself. He continues really even to support now research on the youngest of humans."

Romney retorted during a recent debate: "I get tired of people that are holier than thou because they've been pro-life longer than I have."

But in his criticism of the current U.S. attitudes toward the rest of the world and inexperienced governors, Brownback also rapped Bush, the former Texas governor.

"I think the next president needs to go in and I think we've got to walk more humbly and more wisely around the world," he said.

Brownback, making one of his first trips to the first-in-the-nation primary state, said he is buoyed by a third-place finish in last weekend's Iowa straw poll and hoped his conservative message might give him similar strength here. But his criticism of Bush might help him in New Hampshire, where the unpopular war in Iraq ousted both incumbent GOP congressmen in 2006.

Brownback also repeated his strategy to fight terrorism. He would employ an approach similar to the U.S. policy of containment toward communism during the last century to deal with this century's "long-term battle that we're in right now with militant Islamists."

Brownback opened his remarks at Thomas More College by contrasting his small-town upbringing with the current culture.

"You've got this society that is pulling apart. It's not rooted like this barn here," Brownback said, standing under exposed wood beams. "Society has forces that pull it apart, so much more so than the farming community I was brought up in. . . . How do you hold a society together when you have these forces that pull every which way?"

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By PHILIP ELLIOTT

The Associated Press