-- Who nourishes a regulationist mentality that would intrude the federal government ever more into the private sector and private lives.

-- Who in mid-October -- according to polls -- was deemed unqualified for the presidency by 45 percent of the electorate (about the same percentage as in mid-March).

-- Who falls woefully short on energy independence, especially in his odd resistance to the nuclear power without which the U.S. cannot free itself from the tightening noose of hateful petro-dictatorships such as those in Moscow, Caracas and Tehran.

-- Who dismisses as somehow flawed the achieving feminism of a Sarah Palin possessing more executive experience than Messrs. Obama and Biden combined (yet still mocked by the left as unqualified to be vice-president), in favor of the "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" feminism of Gloria Steinem.

-- Who, in league with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid manipulating a Democratic supermajority in Congress, would preside over an aggressive leftist orthodoxy re-established in Washington utterly unstoppable -- as at no time since the New Deal and the Great Society. Says McCain: "Were my opponent elected with a Democratic Congress in power, not only would there be no check on my opponent's reckless economic policies, there would be considerable pressure on him to tax and spend even more."

So if you believe this is the hour for Barack Obama in concert with a fevered leftist Congress to radicalize and revolutionize, go ahead and make his day -- and liberalism's.

My vote will go to John McCain -- an experienced conservative reformer who understands two things Obama evidently does not: (1) the folly of raising taxes in a financial storm, and (2) the implacable islamofascist threat.

Notes McCain: "In Obama, perhaps never before in our history have the American people been asked to risk so much based on so little." And: "The hour is late. Our troubles are getting worse. Our enemies watch. We have to act immediately. We have to change direction" -- but to a new direction based not on whacked out leftist theory but on prudence and right reason.

To borrow a familiar campaign theme, the McCain-Palin ticket represents precisely the "change we need."