In Egypt’s upcoming presidential election, there are three main contenders.

One is a septuagenarian dinosaur who served a decade as foreign minister in Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship.

Another was quoted in 2004 by Ikhwanonline—the website of the Muslim Brotherhood—calling for “Arab and Muslim peoples to prepare for Jihad, and boycott all forms of dealing with the Zionist-American enemy and the states that support it.”

And then there’s the third guy, who’s the real hardliner.

Welcome to Arab democracy, post-Arab Spring. That third guy is Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a telegenic Salafist who admires Iran, wants to abolish the peace treaty with Israel, end trade with the West, and have women work at home. The Weekly Standard carried an instructive piece about him in September, warning that he had a good shot at winning the presidency. On Sunday, the New York Times got around to taking note of him, too, apparently since the State Department has also come around to thinking he could win.

Which brings us back around to candidate No. 2. 

He’s Khairat Al Shater, a multimillionaire businessman who was the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy head and de facto CFO until last week, when he resigned the Brotherhood (with its blessings) to run for president. Though the Brotherhood had pledged not to field a candidate, it’s doing so anyway out of frustration with the reluctance of Egypt’s military rulers to cede effective power more quickly. And that’s OK with the Obama administration, partly as a hedge against a possible Abu Ismail victory, partly because they’re OK with him.

Mr. Shater, the Times reports, “is in regular contact with the American ambassador, Anne Patterson, as well as the executives of many American companies here, and United States officials have praised his moderation as well as his intelligence and effectiveness.”

About Mr. Shater’s intelligence and effectiveness, there’s little debate. But as the quote from Ikhwanonline suggests, “moderation”—except perhaps in the broader company he keeps—is another matter.

So, on the subject of Israel, Mr. Shater noted that the killing of Hamas’s Ahmed Yassin was “a heinous crime corresponding to the perfidious nature of the Zionist enemy.” As for negotiating with Israel, he called it “mindless”: “The only way” to deal with the Jewish state, he insisted, “is jihad.” He faulted “the enemies of Islam” for trying to “distort and remove [jihad] from the hearts and minds and souls of Muslims.” He blasted the U.S. for preventing “the Islamic nation in its entirety” from eliminating “the usurper Zionist enemy.”

Of course that’s just Israel, and what else is a leading Muslim Brother supposed to say? Still, given that the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is a cornerstone to U.S. policy in the Mideast, it might at least call into question the wisdom of the U.S. becoming comfortable with a Shater presidency.

Then there’s Mr. Shater’s ideas about governance in general, spelled out in a lengthy talk he gave last year in Alexandria about the history, philosophy, methods and ambitions of the Brotherhood. (An English translation will be available later this month at the Hudson Institute’s currenttrends.org.)

A few sentences in Mr. Shater’s talk will come as music to Western ears: He calls for an independent judiciary, rule of law, economic development and the peaceful rotation of power.

But that has to be understood in the context of Mr. Shater’s broader aims: “Restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception; subjugating people to God; instituting the religion of God; the Islamization of life.” His notion of an ideal citizen is a cadre: “Every individual in the Society should be . . . a walking Quran.” Similarly, his notion of religious piety is organizational commitment: “With individual piety the issues connected to organizational developing must also be present.”

More important, while Mr. Shater believes that different historical circumstances require different organizational tactics, he is adamant that the Brotherhood’s goals must remain fixed and unyielding.

“No one can come and say, ‘let’s change the overall mission’. . . . No one can say, ‘forget about obedience, discipline and structures. . . . No. All of these are constants that represent the fundamental framework for our method; the method of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is not open for developing or change.”

What Mr. Shater is advocating, in other words, is the creation of flexible democratic political structures within the rigid framework of a quasi-totalitarian society. And like all totalitarian visions, it even comes with its own Guardians of Virtue: “The Revolution,” he says, “needs to become perpetual,” with a core group of “one or two million” to safeguard the revolution from its enemies. In the old Soviet Union, that job was done by the KGB. In Iran today, it’s the IRGC.

Is this vision of a regime really compatible with American values and interests? People in the Obama administration seem to think so. Hang on, wasn’t there a third candidate? Amr Moussa, dinosaur, is looking better all the time.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com