Here's a letter I wrote to the Economist magazine in response to an article entitled "America at its best" in which they claim that McCain and Obama represent "the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time."

Sir: As a political junkie, I was surprised to read your belief that between John McCain and Barack Obama, the United States has “a decent choice”. It’s a choice, yes, but hardly decent. John McCain is self-admittedly weak on matters of economics (something I would have expected the Economist to care about) at a time when the economy is in the forefront of voters’ minds. He is “bipartisan” in the sense that he encourages Republican to vote for Democratic measures…but never the other way around. And he has swallowed the same cap-and-trade kool-aid that Obama has, suggesting he will support the biggest threat to America’s economy during my lifetime.

Obama is an untested rookie Senator who came up from the cesspool of Chicago politics. Strangely, neither Tony Rezko nor Reverend Wright is “the man I knew 20 years ago”, casting serious doubt on his judgment, his memory, or both. His spending plans will bankrupt the nation if put into place, and his national security views may leave us with a sort of existential risk that no prior President with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter would have considered tolerating. And if Obama’s tax-and-spend policies don’t push the nation into a serious economic downturn, his anti-free trade policies surely will.

You may be right that this is “the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time” but that doesn’t mean we have a good choice. It is simply a sad reflection on the quality of our leading politicians for the last two decades.