"Vote with our feet?" You don't strike me as the kind of guy who's shy about disagreeing with someone.

In this case, at the sky-high altitude of abstraction in which Kristol is speaking in that quote, how could anyone disagree?

But his real point is not to convince people of cloud-level abstractions. He's trying to apply the standard conservative framing of what those bad liberals are about to Obama.

According to that narrative, liberals support nanny government, want to tell us how to live, want to shove their values down everybody's throats, etc.

Whatever validity there may be to the complaint, how much it applies to Obama and his policies can't be determined from the fact that his wife uses a rhetorical flourish like "a hole in our souls" in her speeches. A statement like, "Our souls are broken in this nation" doesn't in itself say to me that the speaker is suggesting a political solution. It sounds like evangelical Protestant commonplace to me.

Personally, I'd rather talk theology in church than in a political meeting. But haven't the Republicans been griping for years that Democrats hate religion, or look down on religious people, or some such alleged failing? So why should Republicans find the occasional evangelical phrase from a candidate's spouse as being threatening?

For that matter, the phrases as excerpted by Kristol in your quotation could suggest a more conservative interpretation (in the theological sense) that humanity suffers from Orginal Sin (see St. Paul, St. Augustine) and that government can address only a part of our needs. Honestly, I haven't been studying the texts of Ms. Obama's speeches for such clues, and I have no idea whether she or her husband share an Augustinian view of the inclination of the heart to sin.

Also, "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed,” at least taken in the limited context of the Kristol quote here, may lean a bit toward purple prose in its style. But it doesn't really suggest anything more to me than that she thinks Barack will inspire people to be more involved and engaged with public affairs. That sounds like a straightforward quality of responsible citizenship to me. Has the idea citizens of a republic should be involved and informed about public affairs become a strictly "liberal" ideological notion now?

Of course, that's only in the quoted part. Kristol actually starts off the article by complaining that Obama isn't sufficiently patriotic for his standards because ... he doesn't wear a little flag pin in his lapel! How will the Republic survive?