Mired in warfare adding billions to our national debt and an economic catastrophe draining billions from our national wealth, demand for change has never been more evident.

And make no mistake. Only one candidate stands for change in this year’s presidential race — Barack Obama. Obama’s intellect, temperament and ability to inspire are precisely what we need after a disastrous eight years under George W. Bush.

The Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, was based on misjudgments and misrepresentations. And while we were treating Saddam Hussein as a scapegoat, the real culprit, Osama bin Laden, was escaping into the hills.

Worse, a nation founded on an abiding faith in fairness, decency and due process was snatching up people with only tenuous ties to terrorism, spiriting them away to secret prisons and subjecting them to acts that, legalisms aside, constitute the kind of torture John McCain endured in Vietnam.

On the domestic front, this administration squandered a budget surplus. It combined reckless spending with tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthy, and it embraced a deregulatory zeal leading us into sub-prime housing and investment banking debacles.

McCain is an honorable man who has served his country his entire adult life. But he has embraced the vast majority of Bush’s foreign and domestic policies. During his Senate service, he supported his party as it ran the country first into a shipwreck abroad, then a shipwreck back home.

His belated post-convention attempt to wrest the mantle of change from its rightful holder rings hollow. He can’t legitimately extricate himself from the briar patch of failed Bush policies.

McCain went on to commit a series of impetuous campaign blunders, starting with his vice presidential pick. They include the bizarre suspension of his campaign when the economy tanked, and his puzzling call to put off a long-scheduled debate at a moment when the country was yearning for direction from its presidential contenders.

As his poll numbers slid, he began to sound increasingly testy, desperate and negative. That doesn’t inspire confidence.

Obama offers superior tax, health care and energy plans. He offers the better policy for extricating us from war and restoring America’s tattered world standing. He offers charismatic qualities that inspire hope and stir dreams.

The contrast is all the more stark when the Obama/Biden ticket is compared to the McCain/Palin ticket.

Joe Biden projects the same kind of measured calm and sure command of the issues as Obama. His wealth of experience enhances Obama’s candidacy as surely as Palin’s painful lack of it diminishes McCain’s.

What could McCain have been thinking when he tapped a former small-town mayor barely into her first term as governor of a state with a population about the size of Portland? Sarah Palin is woefully unprepared for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency.

She lacks the intellect, grasp of issues and national/international experience to stand a heartbeat from the presidency — especially when that heart beats in the chest of a 72-year-old four-time cancer victim. She’s an ideologue from the far right who’s shown a propensity for pettiness and self-aggrandizement.

The pick suggests two things about McCain: He’s willing to put personal interests above national interests, and he’s prone to rash, impetuous actions.

FDR led us out of the Great Depression, following a market collapse that occurred on the watch of his hapless Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover.

We have to place our hopes for like leadership in perilously similar times in the hands of one of two men. We place ours in the hands of Barack Obama.