Last night I heard Barack Obama declare to a rally in Missouri, "We're going to totally transform the United States of America!"
Totally? Does it need it? Do we want it? I mean, sure, it's got problems (it's the worst except for all the rest, etc.), but I thought it was pretty good and evolving to be better, in spite of the inevitable setbacks.
That reminded me of the one truly scary thing -- only one -- I've heard Michelle Obama say, and it hasn't been much commented on. She said, "We know how the world should look! We know how the world should look!" She felt so strongly about that she said it twice.
People who are sure they know how the world should look (they are not found only on the left, of course) can get quite totalitarian about "transforming" it, given the chance. This, it strikes me, is a major argument for limited government. I wouldn't want to be governed by right-wing Christian theocrats, and I don't want to be governed by left-wing utopians. The messy marketplace of contending ideas, and the developments that go on at a much deeper level than ideas, can be trusted, in my unauthorized opinion, more than any programmatic vision of social justice, and more than the Bible. (This perspective is not so much Libertarian as Taoist, but the two can comport rather nicely.)
Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress; Sarah Palin and a Republican Congress -- those are the two scariest scenarios I can imagine. They both amount to takeovers by control freaks who "know how the world should look." We're a lot closer to the former than the latter. We could be subjected to two years of intensive leftist social engineering before Congress changes hands. Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, would kinda cancel out.
I doubt that John McCain thinks he knows exactly how the world should look (though I'm sure he has a strong sense of how it shouldn't look). In that respect, his age is in his favor.
P.S. For a fine Taoist political fable about the do-gooder impulse run amok, read Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven. (I know, I'm repeating myself.)