Raane hit on a good point.

It's not relevant to suggest that voting for Barack Obama is similar to the decisions people made to vote for George Bush.

The kind of people who found George Bush likeable are a fairly anti-intellectual bunch, who, like Bush himself, turned out to be easily led to believe fairy tales, like fear of Saddam/WMDs, validity of a "war on terror," the "gay" threat, the "Islamic" threat, intelligent design, and so on. The people who voted for Bush because he was likeable were the people who went to Church while condemning everyone else who wasn't like them, who continued to believe that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda long after it was debunked. They were the kind of people who believed that war veterans like Kerry were less patriotic than chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney and company.

"Regular guy likeability" was really George Bush's only chief "quality." It certainly was NOT his eloquence, his intellect, his charisma, his passion, his mastery of the English language, or his "administrative experience." The guy had a history of failure after failure.

And let's face it, the reality is, the majority of Americans in 2000 didn't even vote for "likeable" George Bush. They voted practicality, and voted for Al Gore. But the power behind Bush -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the neocon cabal -- stole that vote.

And in the following years, with 9/11 hysteria, the craven media and craven Democrats abandoned all responsibility, allowing the power behind Bush to run the country, its finances, its environment, and its reputation, and its moral authority -- right into the ground.

That's what you get for electing a "likeable" but truly incompetent, ignorant puppet with an alcoholic personality, whose backers and "brains" are a cabal of megalomaniacal psychotics.

Barack Obama has NOTHING in common with George Bush.

Barack does not have "regular guy likeability." He is profoundly charismatic. He's brilliant. He's eloquent. He's able to inspire. He's a superb writer. He's not an alcoholic. He's not the do-nothing child of a rich, privileged family. He has administrative experience from his successful legal, professorial and political career. He has generally had success at most everything he's done. He's a thinker. And he's even somewhat of a philosopher.

People don't want to vote for him because they want to have a beer with him. People want to vote for him because he inspires them, and they know that if he can inspire them, he may actually be able to inspire our Congress, and perhaps even inspire our friends abroad, and dare we hope, even reach out to and possibly inspire our enemies.

That is something George Bush could never do -- not in a million years, and not over a million beers.

And they know that Barack is so smart, so confident, so self-directed -- that there's no chance he would be led around by the nose like Bush.

There's a big difference between wanting to have a beer with a guy, and trusting his leadership, intellect, morals, ethics, and skills enough to entrust him with our country.

I think the country is starting to wake up to that difference.