Posted by
oldscout on Tuesday, January 08, 2008 5:37:10 PM
SELECTING A CANDIDATE
A good friend of mine, Anne
Lieberman, wrote an interesting piece at her blog on the differences between
the Republican and Democratic candidates for their respective party nominations
for President. You can read it
here. http://bokertov.typepad.com/btb/2008/01/democrats-are-m.html
It got me thinking about the
method my wife and I use to select candidates that we will support, in both
local and national elections. We do try
to achieve agreement, so that our votes don’t offset each other, and usually
wind up with the same candidate. I
thought I would share this method of selection, in hopes that it would assist
some of the undecided voters facing the very serious task of exercising the
most important right we have, that of selecting the people who will represent
us, and make decisions affecting our lives, our city, our state and our nation.
In the interest of full
disclosure, we are both registered as Republicans, but never vote strictly on
party affiliation. Rather, we make every
attempt to be objective, and base our preference on actual positions. Before retirement, my years as a financial
analyst and system administrator have had a profound impact on the way I make
decisions of importance. Therefore, this
method may prove useful to any reader, regardless of political persuasion.
We each make a list of the
ten issues that are most important to us, and can actually be affected by the
candidate for whatever elective office we are rating. We rank these ten issues with a weighted
score of 1 to 10. The most important
issue has a point value of 10; the least important has a point value of 1. A perfect score on all issues would result in
a score of 55 points from each of us. I
would mention at this point that no candidate for any office we have rated ever
achieved an individual score of 55, let alone a combined score of 110. Using all informational assets available, we
research each candidate’s position on these issues. Since we are both Chicago born skeptics, we not only look at statements,
speeches and position papers from the current campaign, but also view their
past positions and voting records, to determine their commitment to their
present positions.
After we have each worked
separately, and scored the candidates appropriately, we combine our scores for
each candidate. If there is any
significant disparity in our selection, we discuss where the divergence lies, and
work to resolve the differences.
Usually, we are able to agree on a single candidate, and vote
accordingly.
We do have several simple
rules to our methodology. One is that we
will not vote for any candidate who scores less than 56, out of a total of 110 possible
combined points. This rarely happens,
but is not unheard of. In the 1996
presidential election scoring, Bob Dole scored 48 on our combined ratings, and
Bill Clinton scored 45. After
discussion, we agreed on a write in candidate, and voted neither Republican nor
Democratic in that election. On each
issue, there are only two possible point values. For example, if the issue is illegal
immigration, and it is rated as the third most important to us, the candidate
can either get an 8 or a 0 from each of us.
In other words, we either agree with the candidate’s position, or we
don’t. There is no equivocation or
‘spinning’ in our system. We leave that
to the politicians.
I don’t make the claim that
this is a perfect system, but it does work for us. It provides us with at least a semblance of
objectivity rather than partisanship, and induces us to research candidates on
their records and positions, rather than rhetoric and personality. The most important aspect, at least to my
bride and I, is that we can and do discuss politics with each other without
rancor or argument. That two contentious
Chicagoans remain married after 42 years shows that logic based decisions,
rather than emotionally based perceptions are better, even if less than
perfect.