For a man intent on moving into the White House, Rudy Giuliani carries a lot of baggage – but it’s his draft-dodging past that may prove the biggest drag in the campaign, prominent veterans tell New York magazine in tomorrow’s issue.

Speaking about terrorism and the Iraq war last week, Giuliani boasted, “It is something I understand better than anyone else running for president.”

But it was draft deferments that kept Giuliani, 62, out of Vietnam while he attended law school.

He was granted a 2-A occupational deferment for his job as a law clerk in 1969 after his boss, the late Manhattan federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon, wrote a letter to the local draft board – a move criticized years later as rare and questionable.

Law clerks were not on the 1968 list of critical jobs that qualified for occupational deferments.

When the deferment expired in 1970, Giuliani became susceptible again – but lucked out with such a high draft number that it would have been unnecessary to attempt to continue his exemption. He was never called.

Giuliani “has made it clear that if he had been called up, he would have served,” Giuliani spokeswoman Katie Levinson told New York magazine. He was opposed to the war in Vietnam on “strategic and tactical” grounds,” she added, although she wouldn’t offer specifics.

“Voters will choose the next commander-in-chief based on their whole record, and we believe the mayor’s record speaks for itself.”

Opponents told the magazine they see a chink in the warrior-mayor’s armor, and intend to aim for it.

“If Giuliani is the nominee, we’re going to hammer him with ads, and it’s going to be easy because the issue is simple: He’s a draft dodger,” Jon Soltz, an Iraq vet who served as a captain and runs VoteVets.org, a left-leaning version of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, told the magazine.

“Giuliani gets a zero-zero,” added Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to the group. “He wasn’t willing to risk his life for his country, and he has no relevant experience that’s in any way useful to be commander-in-chief. He hosted the U.N. and had a large police force.”

And although an AP-Ipsos poll last month indicated leadership traits or experience are far less important to voters than character attributes such as honesty, a sense that a candidate can handle the role of commander-in-chief remains important to most Americans.

“I think that the voters in this post-9/11 era will take into account everything about candidates,” Dayton Duncan, who was an insider on the presidential campaigns of Democrats Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis told the AP, “and part of that filter is, ‘Are you capable of protecting us?’ “