Politics

The presidential candidate who wins the 2008 election will be the first president that Isaac will remember. After all, Isaac will be three years old by the time the election happens in November 2008, and he'll be seven by the time the next election happens in 2012. So we're electing a president who will serve from Isaac's early childhood right through second grade. Second grade! That's getting pretty old.

I know people who say becoming a parent changed the way they felt about the world, and thus about politics. They suddenly wanted to leave a better world for their offspring, so they started to care about the environment, or education, or world peace. (On the other hand, I suppose some people begin to care about lower taxes so they can leave more of their money to their offspring!)

I don't think Isaac's birth caused me to change my political outlook. I think I was always other-oriented and future-oriented in my politics -- I think government has a responsibility to make things better for successive generations -- so having a child fit into my existing worldview. At any rate, I was already pretty darn liberal, so it would be hard for me to become even more radical. I guess I could get more politically active, but activism of any sort is difficult with a toddler in tow. We give money to various causes, but that's about it.

Anyway, today I took an online quiz intended to match up your political beliefs with the positions of the candidates in the presidential primaries. Normally these kinds of quizzes aren't worth the paper they're printed on (ha, ha) but this one seemed pretty good. Here are my results:

95% Mike Gravel
95% Dennis Kucinich
83% John Edwards
80% Barack Obama
78% Chris Dodd
77% Joe Biden
74% Hillary Clinton
71% Bill Richardson
33% Rudy Giuliani
26% Ron Paul
24% John McCain
17% Mike Huckabee
17% Mitt Romney
16% Tom Tancredo
8% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I had seriously never heard of Mike Gravel, but I voted for Kucinich in the last presidential primary, and I've been considering Edwards as my more-realistic vote, so the quiz was accurate for me. If you take the quiz yourself, won't you leave a comment and tell me who it suggested for you?