Writing in this National Journal op-ed, Stuart Taylor is not particularly impressed with the quality of the two major parties’ Presidential candidates this year:

One candidate is an intellectually shallow, closed-minded, strangely smirking, free-spending, hard-right culture warrior who combines smug ideological certitude with stunning indifference to facts and evidence, who is obsessed with shifting the tax burden from the wealthiest Americans to future generations, who claims virtually unlimited power to suspend constitutional liberties, who has alienated millions of America’s onetime admirers abroad, and who has never made a mistake he would not repeat.
The other is a both-sides-of-tough-issues, unlikable, aloof, cheap-shotting, free-spending political careerist whose domestic policies might make the Bush deficits even worse, whose Iraq policy shifts with every political wind, and who has long been close to his party’s quasi-pacifist, lawsuit-loving Left.

Ouch!