Today the race for the White House really starts with the caucus in Iowa. On both sides it will be an interesting race, but it will be difficult to grasp all the aspects that matter from here in Europe. The news updates on this side of the ocean are hardly a reflection of the really important things.
Since I’m not allowed to vote in the elections, I don’t really have a strong preference for any of the candidates. I’m more inclined to support a Democrat, since I do believe the government is responsible for providing some kind of safety-net for its people. So you can say that I’m a liberal in the European sense (based on the theory of Locke), while also being liberal in the current US meaning (liberalism being more or less equal to progressivism, not used in an economic or social sense).
To have a little bit of feeling with the candidates, the Dutch news site EenVandaag has created a VoteMatch application. This application asks you to answer a couple of questions based on the issues in the election. You can assign more points to issues that are important to you and in the end it returns the candidate that reflects your opinion the most. While it’s all very rudimentary (the range of topics is small and not all candidates are included), it’s a nice starting point. Especially if you’re an European and don’t know where to start.
I answered the questions and my candidate turned out to be John Edwards. Not a perfect match, we have different opinions about the financing of education and the status of illegal immigrants, but it gives me somewhere to start digging into the topics a bit deeper.
