UPDATED: MANY FEEL OBAMA IS SMART ENOUGH TO BE A GOOD PRESIDENT - AND THAT THIS IS ENOUGH. HERE'S WHY THEYRE WRONG:

They don't think he has the experience, but they think he is smart enough to make better decisions than Bush or McCain.

I think this is misguided analysis.

WHY?!?! Because intelligence alone doesn't necessarily lead to - and certainly doesn't guarantee - better decision making.

Advice doesn't come in boxes marked good or bad; when advice enters the Oval Office it's all marked good and it's all over the place - with competing interests each having their own agendas and advice.

Weighing advice and making good decisions depends on proper problem analysis and then in properly analyzing potential solutions against each other and thereby testing how well they might each solve the problem.

This should always mean that the decision-maker first creates a priority list of desired outcomes and evaluates potential side-effects by ascribing a value to each potential outcomes of the decision at hand; in other words, all effects and side effects are not created equal and some side effects are less problematic than others. Good decisions requires analyzing all effects and side-effects and evaluating them according to VALUES.

[For thorough discussion of this use this link and read Here is a link to the Kempner Tregoe Analysis System.]

This phase of the decision making process is decidedly UNINTELLECTUAL and has everything to do with VALUES.

This why smart people with bad values make terrible decisions.

Let's look at Obama's decision to OPPOSE the Surge and propose a retreat on a fixed timetable.

This decision reveals a value system which ignores the side effects of giving al Qaeda a huge victory, and ignores the side effect that such a defeat would signal all other real and potential adversaries of the USA and the free World. Obama's retreat would have signaled them that the USA doesn't have staying power and has reverted to Vietnam Era "resolvlessness". It would motivate all our enemies to become more dangerous to us. And make us and all our allies LESS SAFE.

That's why the the decision to cut losses by cutting-out would have been worse than staying the course until the job was done.

The AWFUL decision on Obama's part to oppose the Surge reveals he doesn't have the best set of values for the job of president.

Obama overvalues what foreigners FEEL about the USA and undervalues the INDISPENSABLE role we have played since WW2.

Ot proves that Obama would sacrifice our national security strength on the altar of multi-lateralism and pacifism. It proves that the pacifist/multilateralist VALUE is central to Obama's worldview and it also explains why he is opposed to Missile Defense and would chat with Ahmadinejad et al without any preconditions.

Overall, his values are decidedly leftist and pacifist, and his leftist and pacifist values will mean that all of his decisions will likely have very bad consequences - regardless of his supposed intelligence.

REPEAT: Overall, his values are decidedly leftist and pacifist, and his leftist and pacifist values will mean that all of his decisions will likely have very bad consequences - regardless of his supposed intelligence.

REPEAT: Overall, his values are decidedly leftist and pacifist, and his leftist and pacifist values will mean that all of his decisions will likely have very bad consequences - regardless of his supposed intelligence.

A dumb leftist may make stupid decisions with bad consequences, but a smart leftist will make clever decisions which will have TERRIBLE consequences.

Decision makers with left-wing value systems will make bad decisions because leftist values are unreal: they don't work; they've never worked' they can't work.

Left-wing utopianist schemes implemented by totalitarian regimes run by the best and the brightest in any given nation have ALWAYS failed not because those who ran them were dummies or especially corrupt, but because the schemes are based on a warped value system.

Lefties have a value system which denigrates the sanctity of the individual and which denies the fact that the individual is the sole agent in human social intercourse, and which treats humans as members of a class, and which seeks to set up elites which will predetermine and control outcomes which it deems are better is a fundamentally warped and anti-human system and everything such a value system builds is bound to be bad as a result.

Carter was no dummie. Neither was Attlee or Brezhnev or Gorbachev - or Pol Pot or Stalin or Kim il Sung.

History is lettered with "well-meaning" smart lefties who ruined their countries.

And Obama is one of this ilk - at best.

That's why - if elected, (G-D PLEASE FORBID!), Obama will ruin America, and that will endanger the entire free world.

*******UPDATE - NOTE:

One reason Palin frightens all the lefties and many northeast conservative elite is that she is not an intellectual.

Palin has conservative values and has led a conservative life; she is not a conservative of ideas or essays.

This is also why she has been and would continue to be a great decision maker.