1. Those who want to hear my message of hope and change that promises to fix the hole in the American soul will have to travel to the University of Alaska Anchorage (recently visited by Peter Schramm) this week. There I’ll speak on the Tocqueville and America’s three races or on the American display of both middle-class and aristocratic virtues and vices or on greatness and justice on our very own soil. McCain and Huckabee are bound to make a brief appearance (in my speech). Go to the Polaris website at UAA for further details on this event next Thursday night.

2. There’s a lot of talk about Barack and Michelle’s effort to plug the hole in the American soul through inspirational rhetoric about change. Here the Big O is traveling in televangelist country, with the promise to make us better through his gracious word and without meriting salvation through our good deeds. And, as Michelle has proclaimed, we can finally be proud of our country only because it has recognized its savior through the testimony of its voters.

3. By contrast, Bill Kristol asserts, John McCain loves his country more than himself and is much more about deeds than words. But it’s surely an exaggeration to say that Mac is a man of few words, and it’s probably more accurate to say that he loves both his country and himself a lot. Thank God we don’t have a candidate this time with the self-doubt that plagued even Lincoln and de Gaulle on occasion.

4. I, for one, wish Mac would start talking up the virtue of ordinary Americans in their daily lives. Men and women who know how to live well under God don’t need political salvation. But they do benefit from the encouragement of the right kind of (limited) government policy, and we return once again to "the Warrior" becoming credible as a Republican on domestic policy.

5. I could expand my previous remarks on the Warrior and the Preacher to include one warrior and two preachers (Huck and Obama). Huck has the guts or lack of prudence to make his preaching pretty sectarian (God’s law) and policy-laden (the Human Life Amendment). Barack’s seems nonsectarian and really does seem to replace God with Himself.

6. An article in new AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE (which, as usual, I skimmed for free at Barnes and Noble) makes the point that President Obama is not likely to have either a humble or an isolationist foreign policy. He might well rival the present president in his ideological and even military interventionism--he’s out to the save everyone and maybe every species on the planet and not just our people.

7. If you’re really tough on immigration and a "realist" in the technical sense in foreign policy, you’re out of luck this time. Depending on your definition, it’s possible to say that both candidates are nationalists or that neither of them really is.