Having offered some concerns about Barack Obama, I must now do the same for Sen. John McCain. It's not just for equal time purposes, but also to correct any impression that I favor Sen. McCain -- as at least one reader mistakenly assumed.

No, it is one thing to candidly admit the dangers of an Obama candidacy; it's another to suggest a McCain presidency would be better. I like Sen. McCain -- for one thing, I like the fact that he's a Vietnam veteran and this may be the last chance to get one of us as president.

But I am for Barack Obama. Whatever he does in the way of spending and taxes, I think his election would reconfirm America as the land where anything is possible. The very idea that an African American with the middle name Hussein would be one of the presidential candidates in this election would have seemed absurd just two years ago.

History-making aside, Sen. McCain has his own problems. He is old, to be sure, but that bothers me less than what his age has done to his thinking. Some people are young old and some are old old. For this part, George W. Bush is old young, a frat boy with an outdated view of the world.

Mr. Bush's whole term of reference is the Cold War and before that the struggle against the Axis powers in World War II. With disastrous results, he has transposed all of that onto the War on Terror, which resembles neither (just because the terrorists have a Nazi-like indifference to life does not make them Nazis).

To that extent, John McCain is McBush. He has the same errant view of the world, which animates his foolish desire to stay bogged down in Iraq for goodness knows how long. In his old thinking, John McCain also does not appear smart. We have had seven and a half years of a president not being up to intellectual speed and that's enough.

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