If you don’t have the time or desire to wade through my detailed analyses of the leading candidates, you may want to think about using ABC News’s “Match-O-Matic” online toy instead. It’s significantly more simplistic than my analysis, its questions are pretty transparent to people who have been following the issues in the campaign closely, and its rubric is heavy on stuff that I don’t think matters all that much. But it is faster, with only 14 questions, and cuter, with the java animation of candidate bobbleheads. My Match-O-Matic results: #1 Rudy Giuliani; #2, Bill Richardson, #3, John McCain. But then I kind of already knew that I would favor Giuliani and McCain, so it may be a decent rough approximation.
UPDATE: The Wife tried it, and got #1 Mitt Romney, #2 Ron Paul, and #3 Rudy Giuliani (who she said looked like a garden gnome). I asked her how such a thing could be, and she re-took the test and we talked about the tax policy proposals a little bit. This time, she got the same results, but with Paul and Giuliani reversed (and Hizzonner still looked like a gnome to her). So she read some of my profile of the Governor, and decided she didn’t like him because he seemed “too religious.” Then she asked me if he was the one with the story about strapping the dog to the roof of the car, and when I said yes, she made a noise similar to the kind that she made when we found some stinky brown sludge in the washing machine’s rubber liner yesterday, and announced that under no circumstances would she vote for him. So maybe the Match-O-Matic isn’t so accurate after all.
