What if he had Perry's Brains and Paul's looks?

There is an old story of a very smart man (variously George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, and Albert Einstein) sitting next to a beautiful women. She remarked that they two could have wonderful children with his brains and her beauty. He replied, but madam, what if she had your brains and my beauty.

In the South Carolina primary buildup, a number of voters remarked that it was too bad that they could not clone a candidate with all the better characteristics of each of the four actually running. But what if they got a candidate with all of the bad characteristics:

• Someone who thought like a very rich man with no understanding of what life is like for the rest of us, nor much sympathy for those in need.
• Someone with the kind of ethics that might see him disciplined by the Congress and eventually driven out of office, someone who would accept huge payments from a failing mortgage firm (one that would help drive the financial system into crisis and the nation into a Great Recession), sleeping around during his serial marriages and cheating on his sick wife, willing to close down the government to make a political point.
• Someone with a Christian fundamentalist viewpoint that would alienate most of America, and who would be a super hawk getting us into military entanglements we can not at the moment afford, someone who admits he can not be elected president but advises Republicans to vote for him anyway.
• Someone who would espouse libertarian views, especially on the economy, that would be seen as extreme by most voters.
• Like two or more of the current candidates, someone who flip-flops on issues according to what sells in the electoral marketplace, with no discernible governing philosophy, with no discernible understanding of foreign policy, with no military experience and with no experience suggesting he could run a huge enterprise such as the federal government.

Obama has spent several years learning how to do a really hard job. Do we want to start all over again with someone who would have to learn how to lead the administration, the government and the nation?

Incidentally, I have always like Groucho Marx, especially since my father won the jackpot on his quiz program, You Bet Your Life some 60 years ago.