I remember watching George W. Bush on television at one of his first group meetings with foreign leaders.  It was a NATO summit meeting of European leaders in Brussels six months after he took office.  As the leaders gathered for the traditional group picture, they stood around the nervous President of the United States, who at one point looked up and behind him to laugh at something one of the leaders had said.  In that split second, Bush looked like a lost schoolboy, out of his element.  I will never forget the thought I had then.

This country is rich – rich enough to squander the Presidency.

Any country that would elect a neophyte and a person so lacking in intellectual depth was presumptuously wealthy enough to risk the Presidency on someone whom I was convinced would be a disaster.  I had only a clue from someone who knew him how much of a debacle was at stake.  Now we all know.  The same thought came to me as I watch the spectacle of today’s Republican presidential candidates.

The very idea that some of these people – Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Paul, Perry, Santorum – were not been laughed off the stage after the first debate is testament to the political sloth that the country thinks it still can afford.  And now, Newt Gingrich, the ultimate political parasite who shrouds his presumed gravitas in intellectual claptrap, is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.  It is a sight worthy of the last days of Rome.

A couple of months before Bush flew off to Europe for the NATO meeting, a young HispanicLatino friend of mine had come down from Washington to Florida, where I lived at the time, to talk about his future.  At the beach the next day, he told me he had fallen in love with the woman he had met the previous summer.  He had also been accepted at several prestigious law schools.  His LSAT’s were off the charts.  We talked about which of the offers to accept, and then he began to lay out a plan that included raising a family and engaging in public service.

As he talked about his plans, he uncharacteristically began to fidget.  He is a confident, stable person yet modest.  His exceptional accomplishments had not caused his ego to inflate.  He knows himself and so therefore possesses a rare personal power and demeanor that few individuals ever attain.  Nevertheless, he was ruffled.  Watching him squirm, I smiled and finally reached over and grabbed his wrist.  “Yes,” I said to him, “you can be President, and, yes, you have every right to see yourself sitting in the Oval Office one day.  I just hope there is a country left by the time you run.”

These days he is a successful attorney with two children.  Children change a man, so that now it might be his equally intelligent and beautiful wife, not he, who takes the political plunge.

Were my friends older and farther down the road!  I think of them hopefully whenever I see the frightful mess of candidates the GOP is trying to sell the country.

We cannot afford any of them.

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