The choice could not be clearer. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois should be this nation's next president. As the first African American to hold the highest office in the land, Obama would make history and instantly remake America's image abroad. But that is not why he deserves to win. Obama has the temperament, judgment, ideas and vision to be president. Despite his decades of experience and heroic history, John McCain is not the right candidate for this moment.

No decision highlights this difference more starkly than McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Unlike Obama's choice for vice president, Sen. Joe Biden, Palin is unqualified, profoundly so, to hold either of the nation's top two offices.

Obama's considerable skills are augmented by his intelligence and his ability to inspire. All of that will be necessary to tackle problems that have grown to seem insurmountable over the past eight years. Serious people are talking about the end of America's supremacy as the world's leading economic power. The nation's young assume that they will not be as well-off as their parents. Unless the nation changes course quickly, their parents fear they could be right.

Obama was called to public service early. After graduating from college, he took a poorly paid job working on behalf of the downtrodden in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. He went on to attend Harvard Law School, where he was elected to hold that institution's highest honor, the editorship of the school's law review. That accomplishment required not just a superior academic record, but the ability to do what he has promised to do as president: win over polarized factions of liberals and conservatives.

He is moving a generation of young people because his rhetoric and deeds speak to the better angels of our nature.

Obama has worked to set higher ethical standards for public servants throughout his career. The people he appoints to office people will be well-qualified and willing to put their nation's interests ahead of their own.

Obama has said that he wants advisers who are willing to tell him when he's wrong. The past eight years are proof of what happens when they won't or can't because they all think alike.

It is imperative that the next president right the economy, restore America's credibility in the eyes of the world, combat climate change, confront hostile nations and convince allies that the United States is pursuing the right course for their good as well our own. Obama credits education for the success he was able to achieve. As president, he wants to ensure that all the nation's children are taught by good teachers in good schools and make higher education affordable for everyone who is willing to work hard to succeed.

It is also imperative that the next president end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways that protects America's troops while making the world more, not less, safe. The possibility of doing that in Iraq seems promising, in Afghanistan, daunting. Those tasks can't be accomplished without greater support from America's allies.

Obama's ideas and ability to simultaneously see things from many vantage points makes him by far the candidate better able to solve the nation's many problems. His ability to get rivals to work together and the clean slate he will bring to meetings with the world's leaders will make it easier for him to enlist their aid.

Obama's economic plan, while hardly perfect, is far superior to that of his opponent. His tax policies would shrink, not widen, the dangerous income gap between the richest Americans and the rest.

Obama's health care plan, while far from what's needed to guarantee care to all or level the playing field for America's businesses, shows promise. By contrast, McCain's plan to tax employer-provided health-care benefits and further deregulate health insurance would be disastrous.

Americans have seen their civil liberties diminished, their right to privacy abridged, and faith in the highest levels of the justice system eroded over the past eight years. The ultimate guardian of those liberties is the Constitution as interpreted by the nine justices of the Supreme Court. The next president will make one or more appointments to that court, whose most recent members have been willing to sanction a reduction of rights. Those appointments will affect the direction of the law for a generation.

McCain, by his own admission, would appoint justices cut from the same mold used by President Bush. Obama would not.

The Monitor has twice endorsed McCain in Republican primaries, and there is much to admire in his public record: standing up for humane immigration reform, opposing torture, working with Democrats and, when necessary, bucking his own party. However, in the course of this long campaign he has seemed unable to cobble together a serious, cohesive agenda for his candidacy and for the country, and he has abandoned many of the stands that set him apart from others in his party. At a time when voters seem nearly desperate for a clear break on nearly every major public policy of the Bush years, the message from the McCain campaign has been muddled.