I must confess that I am spending an awful lot of time thinking about Barack Obama. I hasten to add that it’s not, as is the case with Chris Matthews, because the senator sends shivers up my leg. Rather, it’s because I simply can’t figure out how he’s managed to convince so many people that he should be the president of the United States. It’s a lot like trying to figure out how Las Vegas magicians make lions and tigers disappear.

To be perfectly honest, I invariably feel that way about the candidates the Democrats try to foist off on us. But, as a rule, guys like Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, are just typical party hacks. But at least none of them attended a racist church, they didn’t associate with known terrorists and they usually didn’t display their contempt for national symbols and the U.S. military quite so blatantly.

Liberals have tried to convince me that Obama is brilliant. I find that odd because he has said that there are 57 states, that JFK got the Russians to remove their missiles from Cuba by sitting down and chatting with Khrushchev, and that Iran doesn’t really constitute an actual threat because they don’t spend as much money on weaponry as we do. Funny, but “brilliant” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But what do liberals know? They were also convinced that Jimmy Carter was intelligent.

As if Obama’s lack of smarts weren’t bad enough, he compounds the problem with his arrogance. The way he’s forever tilting his head as if he were posing for a statue and employing the royal “we,” I’m never sure if he thinks he’s campaigning to be president of the United States or the queen of England.

Frankly, I’m always surprised when, every four years, the candidate with the (D) after his name is able to muster tens of millions of votes. When you realize that the party has become increasingly Marxist, I find it mind-boggling that the Democrats can consistently fare better than the Greens or the Libertarians in a national election.

If you listen to Obama, you’d get the idea that we’re a third world nation, tottering on the edge of poverty. Every word out of his mouth suggests that America is being ground down by corporations when every sane member of the middle class is well aware that the Democrats, who have never met a tax increase they didn’t love or an illegal alien they didn’t see as a potential vote, and who promote class and race warfare as party policy, pose more of a threat to this country than the Soviet Union ever did.

Obama and his fellow left-wingers keep parroting the line that all the other nations of the world hate us, but I’ve noticed that they never name names. And who can blame them? They’re not likely to mention that they’re referring to the likes of Iran, China, Yemen, Venezuela, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, just as they’re not likely to mention that England, France, Germany and Italy, have all elected conservative leaders in the past few years, while dumping the leftist likes of Chirac and Schroder along the way.

Because the MSM adores Obama, they continue to promote the notion of Obama as a great orator, but he is actually no more silver-tongued than your average radio announcer reading ad copy for baby wipes. The fact is that when asked a direct question, the man turns into a blithering idiot, even though you would imagine that by this late date he would have memorized the appropriate lines. Perhaps the problem is that this new style politician is so driven by polls that from moment to moment he’s not sure exactly how he feels about the 16-month deadline in Iraq, the surge, offshore drilling for oil, election financing or dividing the city of Jerusalem. Heck, he even changed his opinion about Reverend Wright overnight. On one notable occasion, during the primaries, he was heard to ask if he could just have a moment to finish his waffle. We all thought he was referring to his breakfast. But apparently that wasn’t the case because the man hasn’t stopped waffling yet.

Even after all this time on the stump, I have yet to hear what he would have done about Saddam Hussein if he’d been president. After all, his liberal colleagues had spent much of the 1990s insisting that there had to be a regime change in Iraq. And as Georges Sada, Hussein’s air vice-marshal, has stated in his 2006 book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” Hussein had all the WMD that Kerry, Kennedy and the Clintons thought he had, but had his chemical arsenal airlifted to Syria after the allied invasion began, in the hope of convincing the world that he was the innocent victim of American aggression.

Knowing Obama as we do, we can only assume that if he’d been occupying the Oval Office he would have sat down with Hussein, and through the sheer power of his personality and his white teeth -- or do I repeat myself? -- would have convinced the Butcher of Baghdad that while it’s nice to be important, it’s more important to be nice.