As much as any time since the Great Depression, America needs a President who has the potential to emerge as a truly great leader. Mired as we are in an unwinnable war of our own making and faced with an economy on the brink of the second greatest depression in our history, we need a President who has the capability and character to put this country back on track. To my mind, that person is Barack Obama.

When I look at the history of the U.S. Presidents, the two that stand out as the most inspirational leaders this nation has had are Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Certainly, the reader may be inclined to select other choices, such as FDR, Washington or Jefferson, but I chose these two because of the magnitude of leadership that was the hallmark of their presidencies.

Lincoln shepherded the United States through the most difficult period of our history and helped this Nation define who we are. Kennedy’s New Frontier laid the foundation for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society’s civil rights achievements and challenged this nation to put a man on the moon within a decade.

So, when I look for a President who has the potential to emerge as a great leader, I look for someone who embodies the key traits exhibited by Lincoln and Kennedy. And when I consider just what those key traits are, I invariably come back to three – Intellect, Integrity and Compassion.

There can be no doubt that Lincoln and Kennedy each possessed as great intellectual capability as any of our Presidents. I would submit that, while Intellect alone certainly cannot ensure greatness, without it one has no chance to walk with the Great Ones. After the eight years of dumbing down of the Whitehouse to which the American people have been subjected during the G.W. Bush administrations, we need a President who possesses the intellectual capacity to think outside the confines of the Washington Establishment and put this country on a new tack toward achieving great accomplishments.

Of the three candidates left standing, only Barack Obama has the requisite Intellect that can be brought to bear on solving this country’s problems. Clinton, to be sure, is no dummy, but there is a difference between being merely smart and being intellectually challenging. She has shown little in the way of original thinking and when placed in head-to-head comparison with Obama in an intellectual argument, she invariably finishes a distant second. As for McCain, well, although I admire what he went through in Vietnam, from an intellectual standpoint he’s about half a bubble short of plumb and is cut from the same schoolboy cloth as is the current “new-ku-ler” President.

Integrity, by its very nature, is much more difficult to measure than Intellect. Lincoln’s Integrity, I believe, peeled loudly through his consistently even-handed responses to his many vituperative critics and his level-headed handling of numerous situations in which he was either subverted or simply failed by those upon whom he was forced to depend.

Kennedy’s Integrity in his personal life might be called into question by some (there is, after all, that Marilyn Monroe thing), but much of the mud that might be splattered on him was the result of the actions of his father, not of JFK. If some of Chicago’s voting machines really did end up in Lake Michigan, it is fairly conclusive they did so at the behest of Joe Kennedy and that JFK had no prior knowledge of the act. In his public life and certainly during his presidency, JFK stood tall and exhibited the level of Integrity we should expect in the leader of our country. He never lied to Congress; he never violated the privacy of the American citizen; and he never condoned the torture of foreign nationals in the name of “national security.”

Of the three candidates currently in front of us, the only incident of which I am aware that sullies, beyond all reasonable doubt, the Integrity of any of the three is John McCain’s recent vote against the limitation of the use of torture by agents of the U.S. Government (see The Case Against John McCain ). I don’t consider the occasional mis-statements by any of the candidates to be a lack of Integrity, and I believe Barack Obama should be given high marks for his handling of both the Jeremiah Wright hullabaloo and the inaccurate accusations that he is a closet Muslim with sympathies for the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism.

Finally, we come to Compassion.

Lincoln is, of course, most remembered for his Gettysburg Address. But his personal character was more strongly reflected in his Second Inaugural Address. At a time when the country had been embroiled in the War Between the States for four years and a mere five weeks before he would be assassinated, Lincoln addressed the pending resolution of the conflict. To those who would saddle the South with the retributions many saw as the right of the Victor over the Vanquished, Lincoln advocated forgiveness. Instead of demanding the hangings of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, as Bush did Sadam Hussein, Lincoln advocated for both North and South, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In his January 1961 Inaugural Address, Kennedy addressed the Nation with, “To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required€”not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” With this, he put his stamp of compassion on a Presidency that was all too short.

After eight years under a President who has repeatedly shown he has no compassion for anyone outside his circle of wealthy industrialists by systematically dismantling the Middle Class, spending American lives and money on a war that benefits his profiteering cronies and feeds his personal ego at the expense of untold suffering by both the American and Iraqi people, and by shredding the Constitution at every opportunity, we deserve, nay we should demand, a President who will build his or her legacy on a foundation of trust and compassion. Again, I fervently believe this person is Barack Obama.

Will Obama be one of those who walk with Abraham, Martin and John? I don’t know. But I do know he is the one candidate we have that has that chance.