GENUINE INTELLECT. Cheney-Bush have dumbed down our government long enough, making Uncle Sam look like a deranged gunman capable of thinking only at the butt end of a rifle. I suppose this is what you get when you team up a college dropout with a college grad who prides himself on his average average. Come on, America, wise up and elect a smart team this time!

MENTAL FLEXIBILITY. Cheney-Bush have tried long enough to sell us common, ornery stubbornness as a rare manly virtue. It is neither rare nor manly. Today's complex problems require nuanced solutions, and being a person of principle should not be confused with being one of impenetrable mind and unbending will.

POLITICAL IMAGINATION. Anyone who tows a straight party line on every issue--or compels others to do so in the name of loyalty, consistence, or some other false deity--lacks vision and is not fit to be President. That person will end up serving a philosophy and not a people.

HARD-HEADED REALISM. We'll need a President who can face facts before, after, and during the fact. Human-induced climate change. Domestic health care crisis. Soaring national debt. Government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists. Broken vote-counting system that new machines alone cannot fix (especially if their brand name is Diebold.) US military stretched thin. Torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Civil war in Iraq. Floods in New Orleans. Wisdom in the UN (which the present White House occupant denies as firmly as your typical skinhead denies the Holocaust.) An Attorney General who can't talk straight. A Vice-President who can't shoot straight. Need I say more?

RESPECT FOR LIFE. We'll need a President who is pro-life in every sense possible. It beats me how anyone who can see a precious, unique, unreplaceable life in a human fetus can not see the same in every human being just barely hanging on in a dead-end job, a poor neighborhood, a pollution-ravaged city, a war-torn country, a crowded death row, or the mind-numbing limbo of an EC (enemy combatant) camp. For proof of this particular qualification there are no litmus tests, but there is precious little room for lightly dismissing the social and political conditions that help create all of the previously mentioned human tragedies.

RESPECT FOR THE CONSTITUTION. We'll need a President completely familiar with, and totally committed to, the US Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights. That this even must be mentioned reveals how far down a long, dark road Cheney-Bush have taken us.