The Candidates
Ben was talking about political quizzes the other day, and I decided to take a few myself. Some thoughts based on taking them and a comment I left on Ben’s site:
The ABC Match-o-Matic seems particularly bad. The pigeonholing involved is pretty awful and prone to misrepresentation. Based on the quiz, my top candidate is Kucinich with whom I apparently agree on 4 out of 11 issues. Following Kucinich are Joe Biden and Mike Huckabee (both 3/11). Unfortunately, on most of those 11 issues, I felt like I was settling for a best approximation of my actual preference, since none of the supplied answers (or wordings) seemed very close. Honestly, 4 of 11 is the best they can do?
I found the Glassbooth quiz somewhat more rewarding. It does far less pigeonholing, since it asks for a level of agreement with certain topics or actions instead of choosing from a list of carefully worded answers. It also allows you to rank the most important issues to you, and presumably weights answers accordingly. On Glassbooth, Kucinich still leads, followed by Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel. Since the scales are arbitrary it’s kind of meaningless, but it makes me feel better nonetheless when it says I have an 81% similarity (compared to 4 of 11 issues).
The ABC thing seemed to fall in line with what you can expect from US commercial news outlets: watered-down swill. The glassbooth thing seemed an interesting approach, and at least produces an interesting result. (Case in point, my ABC result had Ron Paul in 3rd place. I’d sooner take a bath in acid than vote for that nutjob.)
If you care, my glassbooth came up Kucinich, Gravel, Edwards. My Clinton score was higher than my Obama score (within 3 points though.) Truth is though, we don’t vote purely on issues. We’re not voting for vote-casting, policy-making automatons; we’re voting for people. I might actually rather see a president McCain over a president Kucinich, despite disagreeing with McCain on countless issues (43% glassboth match! :) But I think he could probably do the job (and I’m not convinced Kucinich could.)
Of course, none of them has a hard act to follow.
Posted by: gefilte on January 16th, 2008 4:27 PM