Listen to Your Gut

By Alan Caruba

I have a friend who has built an international reputation as a negotiation coach. He is the author of two bestselling books on the subject and one of the salient pieces of advice he shares with the reader is to go with their gut feeling when it comes to deciding whether to do the deal or not.

He’s not kidding! Your brain may be telling you this is the greatest deal ever, but your gut is telling you that something is just not right about it. His advice? Walk away. He also warns that most of us believe we can “read” other people pretty well and, based on his experience working with some of the most complex negotiations and the people conducting them, he says that’s wrong too.

This is why we are often surprised to discover that some politician is a hypocrite or some entertainer has acquired bad habits. In my life I have known enough politicians who turned out to be crooks to assume the worst. Along with the greed for money there is often a libidinous side to a politician’s nature because they often interpret and express power through wealth and sex.

The orgy of shocked commentary regarding former North Carolina Senator and vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, is the media’s typical response to such revelations, but to me the real story was the way the same media steered clear of the story until it was broken by a leading tabloid.

It took a semen stain on a blue dress before any of the media would admit the possibility that Bill Clinton had been lascivious in the Oval Office with an intern about the same age as his daughter. It’s that kind of willing blindness that worries me. And still the media insist on telling us Clinton has such fabulous charisma. That’s not charisma. That’s the stench of recklessness that held the fate of this nation in his hands for eight years.

Sen. Edwards, of course, is the worst kind of hypocrite, married to a woman fighting cancer, a father, and living in a huge mansion while forever blathering on about how deeply he feels about the working poor in America. This self-serving narcissist has only cared about himself.

This is why my gut feeling about Sen. Barack Obama, given the thinnest resume for the highest office in the land, his collection of politically radical friends, and his big mansion, acquired with the help of a convicted developer keeps telling me that he is not to be trusted for any reason. The term “Obama mania” bespeaks an irrational, baseless response to the man.

Obama’s only politics is socialism and if the nation drifts any further to the left in the way it governs itself, America will end up looking like any one of those lame European countries that are little more than welfare states where citizens are told what they can drive and what they can eat.

Wait a minute...isn’t that happening here already? If your gut says yes, you have a very important choice to make in November.