Here's an interesting and entertaining site:
Glassbooth - Quiz to help you choose best 2008 presidential candidate
It's very interesting to use and the results can be surprising. The quiz is in two parts. First you establish weighting factors for various issues. Setting these factors are key in making the results meaningful and I found I needed to revise the weighting once I'd seen how the results came out.
And it's the results that are startling. Not because of who the reveal as the best matches, but that my preferred candidates don't even make the top three through several iterations. Since I'm "So Left" it wasn't a surprise that Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel were closest to my positions, though neither was closer then about 85%, no matter how I adjusted the weighting. What was interesting was how far apart my positions were with my two favored candidates: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
This just serves to prove that even though I say I want to make a rational choice based upon how a candidate matches my positions on issues, the emotional factors are much stronger when actually choosing a favored candidate.
When you use Glassbooth's ability to drill down into each candidates positions on the issues with which you are similar or different in position, you'll see that there's much more gray than black and white. At least for me as I'm often of a much stronger position than the candidates.
For example, on Gun Control, I'm in favor of registering firearms, checking for criminal and mental problems and licensing use based upon passing safety and perhaps even skills tests. (If you can't hit a target, maybe you shouldn't have a gun?)
On the other hand, I do share a most paranoid NRA position: all weapons should be available to the citizenry (and I mean all!) so that we can defend ourselves against not only violent crime, but also against the erosion of freedom or from oppression by the government. If we're not armed then only the Military, the Police and criminals will have guns. If, as we've seen with the Bush administration, our freedoms can be taken away by the government at will, that we can be spied upon, arrested off the street, and sent to concentration camps (Gitmo) to be tortured with no hope of recourse, then we need to be able to fight back and take back our country. This is a basic right we have as Americans. If the political system becomes so corrupted by money from the beneficiaries of oppression then going outside the political system might be needed. Even our nations founders believed this to be the case: see the Declaration of Independence.
I know its absurdly extreme, but it can't be denied that these paranoid fantasies have more relevance now than in the past: the NRA may have a point.
So how does my position match up with the candidates? Most of the democrats would agree to some form of my registration/licensing. In fact, the NRA is in favor of safety testing and might even support licensing based upon the ability to actually hit what you're aiming at if the issue was addressed in an open manner. But I guarantee that no Democratic party candidate, and probably almost no Democrat or Liberal or Progressive would share my paranoid's position. That's reserved for the Libertarian wing of the Republican party, and probably the more paranoid wind of the wing at that.
So Glassbooth becomes a tool for analyzing what you really think is important for the Presidency instead of a matchmaker. One has to analyze how different a candidate is from one's position and what delta can be tolerated. For example, does it matter to me whether John Edwards isn't in favor of having a citizenry armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry? One has to start really thinking about the weighting factors. Does my desire to have a howitzer outweigh the rights of my neighbors to not have someone that heavily armed next door?
Boy does it get complicated.
