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Cimarron, thank you for explaining your view. You will never see a major political candidate who represents your viewpoint, though I'm not sure I'm quite as far away from you as you seem to think I am. Regardless, I think your fear about Obama (as opposed to McCain, or anyone else) is relatively misplaced. The Bush administration has been everything but small-federal-government conservative politics, and a McCain administration wouldn't have been any better in that regard. Now, what they chose to spend money on may have differed-Dems being more likely to spend money on social programs, Reps on military and defense spending-but we're not talking about major changes in the degree of control these administrations want to have over the country writ large, nor on the amounts of money they want to extract from people and spend.
Personally, I don't see a big difference about the where of government spending. I see too much of it, and that, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be a trend we're going to move away from anytime soon. If we have to spend it, I'd rather we spend it on social programs than a military industrial complex and mired conflicts in foreign countries. I share your skepticism for Obama, because while he's run a good campaign, I have no idea what he'll do once he takes up the reigns of power, but from a small-government libertarian/constitutionalist perspective, I don't think he's going to be any worse than McCain would've been. He'll just do it in a different way.
I've little doubt that the founders would be dismayed by the state of the union. But I also have little doubt that the way they envisioned the constitution to work when they wrote it would not work in the modern United States. I think we can do a lot better than we are and have been, but I don't really see a strict constructionist view working very well.
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