On all those issues, John McCain comes down on the side of greater freedom, less spending, more choice and a greater respect for the individual. The choice between these two candidates may be clearest when it comes to two signature issues: keeping the secret ballot in union elections (Barack Obama would abandon it) and taxing the capital that creates jobs.

Sen. Obama explains that he'd raise taxes only on the other fellow, that is, The Rich, as if the rich didn't have the sense or at least the lawyers and trust administrators to start moving into all the numerous and not very productive tax shelters available to them. (In anticipation of an Obama administration, estate planners are already pushing new ones.)

Tax increases that are supposed to affect only those in the upper brackets have a sure way of drifting down into the middle class as the government reaches for ever more revenue. Because that's where the unsheltered income will be. Call it the Obama Shift. One candidate, John McCain, would let small businesses, individual entrepreneurs and capital in general create jobs; the other would just squeeze it.

None of this is to deny Barack Obama's charismatic appeal. He is not so much campaigning for president as announcing a messianic era. ("I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal!") Barack Obama's rhetoric can be blinding (if a little silly), so shiny yet vague that any voter can project his favorite fantasy onto the screen he projects.

In this, the Age of Celebrity, the coming election of President Obama -- for don't the polls say he can't lose? -- would be the crowning triumph of personality over character. But who is he? There is still a hollowness, a cultivated distance, at his political core, however obscured it may be by his undeniable, even attractive manner. In that respect, he resembles Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, who moves through events coolly observing and analyzing them rather than taking part in them.

Is there any doubt who is the unknown quantity in this presidential election?

In the end, what matters most in this presidential election, as in life perhaps, is not who was right but what is right. And that is the ground on which any conservative should stand. With John McCain.