new old post 2: on politics

I stole this delightful quiz from Mike's blog. I'm totally on board with my results for the most part, although I'm a little surprised to hear that 11% of my opinions coincide with stupid f-ing Mitt f-ing stupid Romney's platform. Hugest douche in the universe.

I'd also like to point out that of the Democrats here, my best match (Gravel) got the least votes in New Hampshire while stupid f-ing Hilary f-ing stupid Clinton, who I like least both in the real world and in this quiz world, got the most votes. I may have to quit my frequent trips to the tax-free Nashua retail district in protest. I probably should anyways, for both moral and financial reasons.

95% Mike Gravel
94% Dennis Kucinich
79% John Edwards
75% Chris Dodd
74% Barack Obama
72% Bill Richardson
71% Joe Biden
70% Hillary Clinton
27% Rudy Giuliani
26% Ron Paul
18% John McCain
14% Mike Huckabee
14% Tom Tancredo
11% Mitt Romney
5% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Anyways, all this makes me think about what I'll do when I go to vote in the primaries. I'm not gonna lie, I don't know this Gravel dude well enough to vote for him. And I think he might have dropped out? Since I got a TV I've been doing a lot less NPR listening than I should.

Kucinich, on the other hand, makes me feel warm and fuzzy. The thought of voting for such a long-shot candidate is kind of a dilemma in my mind though. I'm thinking back to the fateful presidential election of 2000, which happened during my sophomore year of college. It the first election where I was old enough to vote, and it was a pretty exciting one.

There were a few of us who weren't registered to vote yet, and we 'heard' that one could register and vote on election day simply by going down to City Hall. It sounded easy enough at the time. What we didn't know is that City Hall in Hartford is similar to a three-ring circus, except without the fun. Yes, there were midgets and peanuts and sideshows, but also a lot of sitting on the cold marble floor in mile-long lines of a thousand people who had the exact same idea as we did.

Add to that the general surliness of civil servants, the unnavigable sea of red tape involved in registering to vote, and the unusually high number of district court cases going on that day... IT SUUUUCKED. But at the same time, it was kind of exciting. We knew the election was a big deal, and it felt pretty cool to be doing out civic duty. Plus we were there for like six hours and ended up missing all of our classes, but for such an honorable reason that no professor could punish us with a clear conscience.

So anyways, when we finally got registered, it occurred to me that I was now a registered voter of Connecticut. This was a whole different ball of wax than being a Massachusetts voter. Namely, I wanted to vote for Ralph Nader. I f-ing love Ralph Nader. In Massachusetts, I could have voted for Nader and felt really good about it (at least that's what I thought at the time). But thinking about it strategically, I decided that it was too risky to 'waste' my one vote on Nader in a state where it wasn't a given that the Democratic candidate would win.

I guess the point is, I love Massachusetts, but I know my vote doesn't really "count" much here. It's kind of like that whole "free-rider" problem our professors always talked about. In Mass I could have written in Mugabe, and gotten all of my friends to do the same, and Gore would have probably still captured the electoral vote. So i could go with my heart, and my principles, and whatever, and vote for Nader without feeling like I might be 'spoiling' anything. At the time I remember some Gore supporters saying that a vote for Nader was equivalent to a vote for Bush. It makes some sense, because 99.9% of Nader supporters [probably] would have otherwise supported a Democrat rather than Republican.

In the grand scheme of things my vote in CT didn't matter much either, but for some reason I felt it was more important for me to vote for Gore there, because it wasn't quite as certain that he'd be able to win without my vote. In the end, of course, it didn't matter that ANYONE voted for Gore, but who saw that whole thing coming?

UPDATE, 5/22/08:
Wow, how irrelevant is THIS now? I voted for Obama in the primary, although I was surprised to see John Edwards still on the ticket and almost voted for him, then when I left I almost made a call to William F. Galvin himself to ask why he would tempt me so. This post, which I wrote back in January, represents the period when I cared about this presidential election. I am so sick of it at this point, I barely listen to the news anymore...