Conservatives, liberals, and independents tend to have a different view of the world and all too often, pundits on the right and left end up preaching to the choir instead of putting out columns that make good sense to people who don't necessarily share our political views.

So today, I'd like to do something a little differently: I'd like to explain to the independents out there why they should want John McCain in the White House next year instead of Barack Obama.

Since most independents would probably acknowledge that McCain is more experienced than Obama, is more capable of handling a crisis, and has proven his bona fides as a bipartisan reformer, there's no need to go back over that well-traveled ground. However, what I would like to point out is that,

As Forrest Gump would say, (Obama is) "like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get:" Paradoxically, one of the things that has helped Obama immeasurably is that his legislative record is so sparse that he has been able to simultaneously portray himself as different things to different groups of people.

All at once, he has been a doctrinaire liberal and a moderate, a radical anti-war candidate and a man who takes a pragmatic approach to foreign affairs, and a bipartisan senator who loves to reach across the aisle as well as a bitter partisan infighter who loves to fight Republicans. So, however you slice it, large numbers of Americans are destined to feel like they were misled when Barack Obama gets into office.

Who are those Americans going to be? I'd suggest that they're the people buying into the image of Barack Obama as some sort of reasonable, bipartisan moderate. If you judge Obama by his record (what there is of it), as opposed to campaign rhetoric, you'll find a candidate who is every bit as far to the left as Rush Limbaugh is to the right.

As Sarah Palin has said, this is a man who has been "palling around with terrorists" like Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn. He spent 20 years going to a radical, anti-white, anti-American church. He had the most liberal voting record in the entire Senate in 2007. In other words, this is a man who is comfortable on the farthest fringes of the American Left. Combine his radical views, his stunning lack of experience, and the rapidly shifting promises he has made during the campaign and it's extremely hard to predict exactly what he'd do and how far he would go if he gets into office. Given what we know about Obama, it would be far less risky to hand a teenage boy a bottle of whiskey and your car keys than it would be to hand Barack Obama the keys to the White House.

Giving the far Left your power of attorney, your pin number, and the keys to your house: Because our Founding Fathers designed a system of checks and balances to keep different branches of government from getting out of control, we don't typically have radical shifts in D.C. Usually different parties control the different branches of government or alternately, bad legislation can be stopped in the Senate, where the minority party has a lot of power.

Unfortunately, because the Republican Party in general and George Bush in particular have done such a lousy job over the last four years, the Democrats are going to have huge majorities in the House and Senate after the 2008 election and so if Obama gets in as well, the Democrats will essentially have carte blanche to do almost anything they want for at least two years.

Put another way, you may not like John McCain or the Republicans in Congress very much, but are you really willing to give Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama a blank check for the next two years? That's the situation we'll have if Barack Obama gets into office and it's why independent Americans who fear having the country radically shifted to the left would be wise to vote for John McCain.

”It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it”: Americans are sick and tired of spending our blood and treasure in Iraq -- and that's perfectly understandable. However, given all the money we've spent, the sacrifices our troops have made, the enormous importance of the conflict in the war on terror, and the staggering potential consequences if we lose (genocide, regional war), doesn't it make sense to make sure that we win?

Granted, because of the surge, which McCain supported and Obama opposed, the situation in Iraq has improved immeasurably. In fact, it has gotten so much better that it's not completely out of the question that Barack Obama could guide us to victory there. However, as Sarah Palin said of him,

"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign."