JOE BIDEN'S FEARS

[originally posted in the New York Times]

Last updated: 5:54 amOctober 21, 2008 Posted: 4:08 amOctober 21, 2008

Joe Biden wonders whether Barack Obama is qualified to be commander-in-chief.

"Mark my words," Biden warned Sunday at a Democratic fund-raiser. "It will not be six months [after the inauguration] before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy."

Then he added, "Watch. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Now, here's where it gets scary.

Obama's "gonna need your help to use your influence within the community to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

He's going to need help?

Terrific.

What's particularly disturbing is Biden's Kennedy analogy.

For those who don't recall, it was a scant five months after JFK became president that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took his measure.

Kennedy had just bungled the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, then went off to a summit in Vienna - where Khruschev determined that the rookie chief executive could be had.

Two months later, construction began on the Berlin Wall, precipitating a crisis that nearly led to a US-Soviet shooting war in Europe.

And 14 months after that came the Cuban Missile Crisis - when nuclear Armageddon was only barely averted.

Is Biden saying that America's current enemies - sorely aware of Obama's inexperience - plan to test a President Obama with similar crises, to see what he's made of?

Sure seems like it.

But what if Obama is still on the wrong side of the learning curve when this major international crisis hits?

More important: What if he makes the wrong decision - as even Joe Biden suggests he might?

After all, Obama was wrong about the troop surge in Iraq.

And he was wrong in his initial response to Russia's invasion of Georgia - when he urged the victimized nation to "show restraint."

And he was wrong when he said he would gladly sit down unconditionally with people like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - the very people his own running-mate now says are planning to "test" him.

As John McCain said yesterday, "We don't want a president who invites testing from the world . . . The next president won't have time."

Little wonder, then, that Biden later admitted that he "probably shouldn't have said all this."

But why not, Joe?

It's doubtless all true.

And it's much better to get it all out now - rather than wait until it's too late to do anything about it.