Any semi-regular reader (that’s you, you and you over there who reads the food posts) can guess on which arm of the political spectrum I lie. (Or quadrant, if left and right are too simple for you.) So you must have been rather pleased that I haven’t been inundating these pages1 with posts about the current drive to select the US presidential candidates who will be duking it out in the final contest this November. It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just that, as a foreigner, I can’t vote. But I can tell you who I would have voted for last Tuesday if I could have. Or would have wanted to vote for if s|he existed.
Quite simply, I would have voted for someone who is/was opposed to invading Iraq, has plans for getting Iraq back to civility, is pro-Social Security, can keep an open mind on stem cell research, supports choice in schools, leans towards fair trade, is pro-labour (the workers, not the UK party), is pro-choice, pro-gay partnership/marriage, anti-death penalty, will bring in gun-control legislation, will act on environmental concerns, fix the crazy US health care system, and isn’t a complete nutjob.
According to one of the very many presidential selection tools out there2, such a candidate DOES NOT EXIST. Hmm, funny that. If this were the UK, quite a few possibilities would have flagged up on all issues except that most important qualifier of not being a nutjob. But, of the US contenders, Dennis Kuchinich came up tops, followed closely by Barack Obama, then Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. No need to even ask where any of the Republican candidates came in. If akatsukira ran the world, those guys would be given a small island in the middle of nowhere3 and told to just get on with it.
So, now you know. Wish you hadn’t started reading, eh?
1 Quite unlike the blog diarrhoea I subjected you to in 2005 then.
2 Ones that compare policy and not hair styles.
3 Kiribati, anyone?
akatsuki ra-ra-ra 
So where does Barack differ from your ideal description? I just can’t see Americans voting for him though…
and bring on the blog diarrhoea 😉
He’s not far off, but isn’t liberal enough. Obama’s pro-gay civil union, but stops short of gay marriage. And he’s a bit wishy-washy on the death penalty. As far as trade goes, his senatorial voting record has been a mixed bag of free and fair. Policy-wise, he is the closest to an ideal candidate for me. But like every other semi-undecided, I wonder if his ideals can change the White House. This isn’t the fictional West Wing, after all.
Solis Doyle, is dispensable, she has served her purpose to help us win the latino vote in the big states. We no longer need her or the latino vote to capture the white house. The women vote will now carry the Hillary campaign the rest of the way. Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with longtime aide Maggie Williams on Sunday. Ms. Clinton believes Maggie Williams is a better choice to target the women vote. Clinton said in a statement. “I am lucky to have Maggie on board and I know she will lead our campaign with great skill towards the nomination.”
i took one of those online candidate calculator tests awhile back, my results were a three way split between biden, giuliani, and wisconsin governor tommy thompson. i couldn’t have predicted a more unpredictable set. but apparently my views are shared with less americans than those that voted for kucinich. probably a good thing. maybe.
http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html if you are interested
oh, but the candidates chosen for me were only 54.09% in accordance to my choices
Santos,
That’s a strange set of bedfellows you’ve generated. And I thought my views were somewhat off-base compared to the “average” American, if such an entity existed.
Interesting by-product of visiting the vajoe site: clear lead for the Republicans amongst the military types. Not surprising, just interesting given that the current guy in charge messed things up for the military so badly.