It’s like watching a drunken teenager at the wheel of a fully loaded semi, and he’s headed into a crowd.

Two of my Republican friends, highly respected by colleagues of both parties, have served in the Illinois Senate for well more than 10 and 20 years, respectively. Obviously, they were there for Obama’s 8 years in the State Senate. I asked them, “What was he like for those 8 years?”

Here is how they described him: 1) intelligent, 2) knack for giving speeches with flowery, even soaring, rhetoric but little substance, 3) DIDN’T REALLY DO ANYTHING except make it clear that he had a desire to run for higher office beyond Illinois, 4) arrogant, 5) aloof, 6) was NOT a leader in the Senate, 7) was not even a leader in his OWN party in the Senate, protected at every turn by Chicago Senate Democratic boss Emil Jones, 9) rarely worked across the aisle except when he actually had to during the time the Republicans controlled the Senate, 10) projected the image that he thought he was just a little smarter or a little better than the others, 11) very smooth, so much so that he could skate around and in-between his Chicago-corruption ties, with nothing critical ever sticking.

When asked, “What do you fear about him?” their answers consisted of two main concerns: 1) underneath the camouflage of the ultra-liberal voting record that he compiled in the State and U.S. Senate was the heartbeat of a “Socialist,” especially in our country’s domesticl affairs, and 2) his disdain for the U.S. military, which will be reflected in how he approaches the “war on terror,” along with his attitude that he can negotiate with rogue leaders and convince the enemy to back off because of his “superior” intelligence and “powers of persuasion.”

I asked the Senators these questions in the summer of 2008 before the Presidential campaign heated up. From what we now see in the White House, wouldn’t you agree that it was “predictable”? If only the media had come to Illinois………

“‘So let me get this right,’ McCain snapped. ‘We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and we say, ‘No you’re not’? Oh, please.”

Sam Rayburn’s remark about JFK’s Best And Brightest staff comes to mind: “I’d feel a lot better if some of them had run for sheriff just once.”

Let’s see; Bay of Pigs, Vienna Conference embarrassment, Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, first military advisers to Viet Nam along with supporting the Diem coup resulting in the abominable Ky regime. All this from ‘the best and the brightest.’.

Oh, yes, I am very afraid of what the USA will look like in four years in the hands of an Administration whose members were never even qualified to be sheriff.

As a brilliant man once observed: “Intellectuals tend to spend their entire lives inside their own minds.”