Election 2008 by the Issues

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a page describing the positions of a dozen of the Presidential candidates on a dozen issues. The issues range from “Poverty” to “Church and State.”

Using this as a guide I assigned a weight to each issue and then ranked each candidate on each issue (except Poverty as I really have no position or understanding of this question).

Each issue was weighted either 5, 3 or 1. Leading the pack with a high weight of 5 were Abortion, Church and State, The Iraq War and Stem Cell Research. A medium weight of 3 was assigned to The Death Penalty, Education, Faith Based Initiatives, Gay Marriage and Immigration. I assigned a low weight of one to The Environment and Health Care.

Each candidate was given a rank of either 1 (I basically agree with the candidates position), 0 (I don’t really agree but I could probably live with the candidate position), -1 (I disagree with the candidates position) or -2 (I violently disagree with the candidates position).

Basically you then multiply the rank times the weight on each issue and then add up the products to get either a positive or negative value. A high positive value indicates significant agreement with the candidate’s positions while a high negative value indicates significant disagreement with the candidate’s positions.

In an election or primary you should vote with an eye toward maximizing the value of the winning candidate. The candidates came out relative to my personal opinions ranked as follows:

Bill Richardson (25)
Christopher Dodd (20)
Barack Obama (20) (Rank #4)
Joe Biden (17)
John Edwards (14) (Rank #1)
Hillary Clinton (8) (Rank #2)
Rudolph Giuliani (-3) (Rank #3)
John McCain (-13) (Rank #5)
Fred Thompson (-26)
Mike Huckabee (-27)
Sam Brownbeck (-30)
Mitt Romney (-31) (Rank #6)

The last time I talked about the 2008 candidates I ranked 6 (also shown in the list) based upon gut feel and my gut turned out to be pretty accurate. My problem with Obama was not his stand on the issues, it was whether or not he had the necessary political experience to take on the job.

I’ve always liked Richardson and this exercise makes it obvious why. But let’s face reality for a second. Unless something totally unforeseen happens, I’m going to, most likely, be faced with choosing between Obama, Edwards and Clinton since I don’t think Richardson, Biden or Dodd have any realistic chance.

All three took hits with a 0 on “Church & State” because of reported quotes that I found very shaky. Edwards is reported to have said that “freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion.” This could have gotten him a -2 except for a number of factors, not the least of which is that he was purported to say it during an interview which included talking about the death of his son.

Clinton got the zero because of a cryptic quote to the effect that religious political officials should be able to "live out their faith in the public square."

I don’t know what the hell that means exactly but I don’t like the smell of it. Obama got his downcheck due to an inference to the effect that in some cases it would be ok to less strictly enforce the separation of church and state. He didn’t do worse because the cases he cited ("under God" in the pledge of allegiance and voluntary student prayer groups) were pretty benign.

So what separated the Big Three? Clinton got a downcheck from me on the Iraq War because she appears to be less comfortable with a timetable for redrawel than the other two and Obama got an upcheck over the other two on the Death Penalty because he seems to have a better grip on the lack of deterrent value and strikes me as the most likely to support, or at least not hinder, an abolition movement.

So I should support Obama? Maybe, if I can get over concerns about his experience and his ability to beat any of the possible Republican candidates all of which got negative scores including Guiliani. I still think Edwards has the best shot of winning so, in the best strategic voting tradition, I think I’ll stick with little Johnnie for the moment but I have to move Obama ahead of Clinton. That makes my new top three:

Rank #1 – John Edwards
Rank #2 – Barack Obama
Rank #3 – Hillary Clinton