With such a large field of potential candidates for the Presidency, it’s helpful to be able to compare views to understand which candidates may be worthy of your support or scorn. Now, this tool is only as good as the data that is being fed into it, and these are all politicians, so you know what that means – the position today is in no way guaranteed to be the position tomorrow. But even with those limitations, this is an interesting and useful tool.
Essentially, it allows you to select your preference for an issue and assign each issue a weight. Left default, each issue is worth 1 point. If you think a particular issue is important, it increases the point total on that issue to a value of 2. If you believe an issue is key, it increases the point weight to 5 for that issue. I encourage you to try it out, first with defaults and then with increased weight to key and important issues. I was surprised somewhat by the results it produced for me, posted below.
Once you’ve tried it out, leave a comment if you learn something. I’d really like to see more commentary on the blog vs. the out of band email that has been routine. Have you seen other tools that would be interesting and useful? Please share them. Tweet
This approach identified a candidate that I would support; however, the small-of-stature Dem from Ohio may be unelectable.
Regarding issues, I recently heard a Democratic spokesman argue why one shouldn’t hold unabashed Israel support against Hilary. His seemingly off the cuff (but I strongly suspect, well crafted, possibly poll-tested) argument was that of the “over 3000 issues†to be debated during an election, one shouldn’t hold one or two issues on which they disagree against that candidate when they clearly agree on the other 2000 or so.
The convenient Israel example portends the logic that Hilary plans to use when she tries to perpetuate the myth that the rest of the world already knows to be incorrect: you can decouple Israeli-Arab animosity from U.S.-Arab animosity and achieve peace in the Middle East. Only Americans buy this nonsense.
This decoupling argument is similar to an argument that one would never make in rational company: “I am not a racist. Of the hundreds of groups (i.e., races; recent human genome work demonstrates that there are no genetic differences among groups/races within our species) in our species, I only hate _________. So I am not a racist.â€
So for future candidate selection tools, keep in mind who built the tool and how they lump/split on issues. Hilary, Barack and all the Republicans (plus Republicans who claim to have scrambled to a higher moral ground in recent years – they call themselves Libertarians) will use this specific Israel-Arab decoupling argument in the coming months because, I am sure, AIPAC insists. Furthermore, if George Bush can still sell us all the lies that he’s been selling for the last 6 years, imagine how successful an intelligent Presidential candidate’s lying could be.
Great comments Andy, spot on from my perspective. Though they are leading in fund raising and in the polls, I tend to think neither Hillary nor Obama are electable for different reasons.
It’s too soon to tell what will happen, but it is interesting watching all of the candidates jockey for position.