He Could Care Less About Obama's Story

True enough. But such "intricate realities" are not best dealt with through "an intuitive grasp of global politics" -- Obama's chief asset, according to the Globe -- but through an intimate knowledge of those realities and of the nuanced responses necessary to address them.

Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005) or held a single policy hearing. He's never faced off with foreign leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years, these things matter.

The main issue in U.S. foreign policy that the next president will face is repairing our image in the world. But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through action, not branding. Which is why one cannot help but sense a touch of shirking (not to mention a lack of short-term memory) in all this talk about "intuitive experience" and "re-branding images," particularly when it comes from those who began the "New American Century" as ardent supporters of Bush's wars and his self-advertised "gut" instincts.

It is as though, rather than accepting blame for the mess and taking responsibility for cleaning it up, they would prefer to slap a new coat of paint on the problem and declare it fixed.

It was "intuition" that made the mess in the first place. It will take more than intuition to clean it up. After all, we are not launching a new product. We are electing a president.

Reza Aslan is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam."