Sunday, September 09, 2007

Who Am I For?   [Jonah Goldberg]

Readers keep asking me who my guy in the primaries is. So far, I really don't have one. I kind of like not having an all-out favorite. Not being sold on any candidate is deeply liberating because you — or at least I — don't feel like I have to make allowances out of favoritism. At the same time, I would really love to love one of the candidates unambiguously. But, I don't. Taking as thorough an inventory as five minutes procrastination from other work on a Sunday will allow, I have decided that my preferences rank somewhere along these lines.

This is a ranking — i.e. McCain and Giuliani are in the number one spot. The percentages show how far they are from reaching the 90% threshhold which would make me declare I want them to win outright. This number is determined by how much I agree with them, how much I would like to see them as president and my gut estimate of how likely it is they would win in the general. If this all seems convoluted and contradictory, so be it. The human heart is a fickle thing. As Walt Whitman said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." ("You sure do!"— the Couch).

McCain & Giuliani: 55% my guy.

Thompson: 50% my guy.

Huckabee: 45% my guy

Romney: 44% my guy

Brownback: 28% my guy.

Tancredo: 12% my guy.

Paul: 8% my guy.

Update: Oops, I forgot Duncan Hunter. Sorry. I guess he's around 18% my guy. But these numbers are very volatile.  Almost as volatile as they are meaningless.

09/09 01:08 PMShare