omorka | More In The Way Of No Surprises

Here's the Politics Quiz that's been going around - not all that different from the other ones.

90% Mike Gravel
87% John Edwards
86% Barack Obama
85% Chris Dodd
83% Dennis Kucinich
80% Hillary Clinton
80% Joe Biden
79% Bill Richardson
36% Rudy Giuliani
28% John McCain
27% Ron Paul
26% Tom Tancredo
25% Mike Huckabee
21% Mitt Romney
16% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Well, okay, there are two mild surprises. One is that Kucinich is unusually low. This is, I'm absolutely sure, the result of the reproductive rights question; my boy Dennis is great on all the other issues, but his record on that particular issue sucks the big one, and it matters a lot to me. (May also have had to do with my response on the gun rights question, but that one was phrased badly and I marked it "don't care" because of that. My actual position is that we need a constitutional amendment to explain what weapons rights, exactly, under what circumstances, are protected by poor ol' Amendment II, and what aren't. "Well-regulated" does not seem to be cutting it. The current set of laws allows me, if I go through the correct permitting process, to carry a handgun much larger than necessary to repel any threat to my life concealed on the streets, but not a halberd. This is clearly dumb. And removing something from the Bill of Rights entirely - or passing laws that effectively ignore it - strikes me as crazy-bad precedent.)

I am amused that Edwards outscored Obama, but only by a percentage point. This roughly matches my opinion on the two candidates; I'm not bouncing-out-of-my-chair thrilled by either of them, but I'll be more than happy to turn my crank to either one if and when he scores the nomination. I'm unenthusiastic about Hillary, because she's too much in the pockets of Big Business and because I think dynastic politics are a bad deal all around (watch out for Prescott Bush in a few years, BTW - he's much sharper than his uncle, and biracial in a time when that's a political plus rather than a minus), but I'd hold my nose and vote for her over anyone in the Republican field - McCain is not a total nutjob, but he lost my respect when he went to crazy-base-land and his Senate voting record scares me. Everybody else on that side of the isle either thinks I'm not really a citizen or that I shouldn't be.