Barack Obama has already indicated that he wants judges who make social policy instead of just applying the law. He has already tried to stop young violent criminals from being tried as adults.

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of "change" endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything has says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not — all this is a re-run of the 1960s.

We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.

Indeed, in terms of judicial appointments, America is paying the price to this day for a dismal mistake we made in 1976. Post-Vietnam and post-Watergate, the country was so anxious to change the party in the White House that the voters dumped the steady, reliable Gerald Ford for the little-known quantity from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Carter's judicial appointments were catastrophic. He single-handedly transformed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the Far West, from a respected court to a disgrace. Today, California's prison system is in the hands of a panel of three judges that is quite possibly the most anti-law-enforcement panel ever assembled in the history of American law. The three judges and the chief judge who named them to the panel were all appointed by Jimmy Carter.