The instant Barack Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring the big knock against him was that he didn’t know a darn thing about foreign policy. And that his greenhorn experience would sooner or later come back to haunt him once he squared off with the big boys and girls in the presidential debates. It has. A USA Today/Gallup poll shows that Obama has taken a sharp nosedive in the ratings in his overheated tiff with Hillary Clinton too grab the top Democratic spot. That was predictable.

When Obama said that he would talk to America’s pariahs, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, the North Koreans and Iranians, it made some sense. After all America’s foreign policy would be a pretty pathetic state of affairs if a president, his Secretary of State, and his ambassadors just talked to their friends and ignored their enemies. That’s a sure fire prescription for deepening tensions, conflicts, disputes, and triggering cold and even occasionally hot wars. But unfortunately Obama didn’t stop there. He popped off about mounting search and destroy operations in Pakistan, a key U.S. ally. Obama came off as worse than naïve and confused. He came off as a walking foreign policy contradiction. That’s the kiss of death for a head of, or potential, head of state. That type of contradiction and the public fears that it stokes has been the death knell for presidential candidates and even presidents.

Remember Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s gaffe in 1964 about nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. A gleeful Lyndon Johnson jumped all over that and Goldwater spent the rest of the campaign trying to defend the indefensible. Jimmy Carter’s botched rescue mission to free American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran effectively sunk his re-election bid. Clinton went straight for the jugular after Obama’s seeming slip and slide on foreign policy and she surged in the polls. Democrats by huge margins say that she’s the best qualified to handle the Iraq war, the terrorism fight, and foreign policy issues.

In a head to head contest with Obama in the South and America’s heartland states Republican presidential nominee Rudy Giuliani or even John McCain would destroy Obama. They wouldn’t have to say a word about his foreign policy greenness to scare voters away. Obama has already done that himself. Now he’s forced to spend time and energy trying to do damage control. And this will make look even more wobbly to voters. Though it’s still early in the presidential game one thing is clear, Obama is the first casualty of Obama.