Well, and what did Your Humble Blogger learn from all of this? I learned a lot about the various candidates, of course, which was interesting and fun in itself. I learned that it is way way easier to project a person's likelihood of being elected than to project their performance if elected.
By the way, I did email each of the campaigns to tell them what I was doing and ask them to comment. The gentleman from Rep. Kucinich's campaign is the only one who has, so far. Howard Dean's campaign sent a lovely form reply; I got a quick response from Sen. Graham's campaign thanking me for the profile; and I think I got another auto-reply, but I seem to have lost it and can't remember who it was from. Either Sen. Kerry or Rep. Gephardt. Or I'm misremembering.
Anyway, there is lots more I could do, although other people could do it better. I concentrated on the experience, priorities, and (to some extent) temperament of the candidates. If someone wants to look at (for instance) who are the candidate's buddies (lobbyists, supporters, etc) it would certainly be informative. Also, I figured that the policy stuff was pretty clearly available; if any Gentle Reader wants to know who was against the war, or for NAFTA, they can find it on the candidate's home page, or in Vote Smart. As a result, I think some of the candidates aren't as clearly differentiated in my notes as they are in fact. And, of course, as Chris pointed out, the relationship between the President and Big Corporations is tremendously important, and tremendously complex. I am hoping he contributes here on that issue, in his, you know, free time.
By the way, anybody else who wants to write a note as a separate entry, feel free to send it to me, and the odds are pretty good I'll post it for you. I'm trying to get a discussion going, learn things I didn't know, and so on. It's a rough process, but it's been fun so far, and I hope it'll go on for a while.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.