McCain must paint with clarity the starkly different worlds that Americans will be buying into when they step into voting booths in November.

Barack Obama is a socialist. McCain must say it. It's not slinging mud but stating fact.

Perhaps a complicating factor in explaining freedom to Americans today is that when "classic" Republicanism was selling, we all still remembered the Soviet Union and communist China. The difference between the United States and the rest of the world then was clearer than today.

When someone said "socialist" or "communist,'' we could look abroad and know exactly what this meant.

There is nowhere where Senator Obama sees Americans suffering from excessive government. The opposite. He sees all our suffering from not enough.

The collapse of communism and socialism abroad was not accidental. Central planning is both dysfunctional and immoral.

Incredibly, Obama thinks that a huge and complex market like health care, where a few hundred million Americans spend almost two and half trillion dollars a year, can be improved with more government controls and spending.

And he thinks that parents, in a country that is supposed to be free, should not be given control over where they send their child to school and the type of education their child gets.

To turn things around, McCain must quickly reestablish the Republican brand of freedom and contrast this with Obama's clear socialism.