Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works is a useful tome in a lot of ways. Among other things it covers the distressingly common situation where what you want electorally is an eagle but all that is on offer from the political mainstream is a chicken and a parrot.
This also comes in handy when looking at political electoral quizzes. Andrew Sullivan went and took CNN's political quiz that determines your presidential compatibility on the issues. Surprise, surprise, he's a relatively sane Democrat. I took the test too with radically different results. The test says more than you might think.
The Democrat party has been going on and on for years about how they're "right on the issues" but have trouble connecting to people. AS' scores show this phenomena in spades. It turns out that for a certain demographic, this is exactly the truth.
It was a pure issues test and he ends up being a moderate, DLC style Democrat in his political beliefs (so much for the idea that he's america's most famous gay conservative). His scores were "Lieberman 100 percent, Kerry 95, Clark 90, Edwards 88, Sharpton 86, Dean 83, Kucinich 76, Bush 61". Maybe I'm a little off base but I worry about somebody who is nodding his head up and down three quarters of the time Dennis Kucinich is speaking. My own DK score was 10% which puts DK in the category of being about as right as a stopped clock.
My full scores were:
100% Bush
47% Lieberman
35% Edwards
31% Clark
30% Dean
28% Kerry
27% Sharpton
10% Kucinich
For me, this indicates that mainstream politics is not really offering what I'm looking for. Mainstream politics is a pretty contiguous arc and the high drop off between Bush and my first Democrat (who I agree with AS is Lieberman) means I'm off the arc somewhere and Bush is my closest point of contact. He's the parrot, the Democrats are variously scrawny and disease ridden chickens and I'm still looking for a winning eagle but willing to settle.
Posted by TMLutas at February 1, 2004 12:54 PM