Well, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not an undecided voter.
But I am a divided voter. Life is not binary, as much as certain parties would have us believe it is. But on the other hand, reality forces us to make choices. So there you have it.
Like everyone else, I am not totally delighted with my choices this election season. I don’t agree with every position one party claims in their platform, and I do agree with some things the other party claims in their platform. Of course, I believe that for the most part, they’re both mostly saying whatever it is they think is most likely to get them elected, given the apparatus of which they are a part, and the biases of their supporters, and so on ad infinitum.
One way to think about politics, and complex issues in general is as a multidimensional matrix. (I guess I just lost 80% of you. oh, well).
[I have a discussion of this topic among my audio journals somewhere… todo insert cross reference to audio blog]
The dimensions of this matrix correspond to your views along an axis corresponding to what pollsters sometimes call “issue clusters.”
The social aspects of health care finance might be an issue cluster. And our opinions around this cluster, like all others, vary depending on our life experiences including our own health and financial situation as well as those close to us.
But the point is that our views on this topic are largely if not entirely independent of our views on some other topics such as national security, for example.
Often there are linkages, as practically everything has some economic implications, from tax policy to immigration.
But the point is that if you listen carefully, you find that there are almost as many different collections of opinions around issue clusters as there are people.
So if you think of all these dimensions, you can visualize them a couple of different ways, I like to think of a hyperdimensional surface.
[todo insert cool graphic here]
but anyway, today it occurred to me to scour the presidential candidate’s web sites first for their ideas of what would be significant issue clusters for visitors to their sites, and second, for their ideas about those issues. and two exercises came to mind: first, assuming they were being entirely sincere and candid, how well did the views espoused mesh with my own? I thought of a distance metric per issue cluster, resulting in a distribution, visualized as a curve maybe, where the columns correspond to the issue clusters and the distance from the axis would represent the distance of the candidate’s views from my own on that topic.
[insert another cool graphic here with explanation for example.]
so you could imagine someone who was a perfect match for me would yield a flatline, but most likely you’d see some kind of bar chart or the like where some matches were close and some were wildly diverging. (or am I describing a singles dating service? maybe I am. maybe modern politics isn’t as different from dating as we might wish to think. hey! maybe match.com should get into the political consulting business?)
maybe if you need it to boil it down to a single dimension, you could sum or average the distances.
but even the juxtaposition of taxonomies can be interesting. johnmccain.com has this breakdown:
The Economy
Health Care
National Security
Education
Iraq
Climate Change
Veterans
Immigration
Values
Second Amendment
Judicial Philosophy
Ethics Reform
Natural Heritage
Space Program
its fascinating. for example, foreign policy doesn’t rank as a top level category. the whole concept is framed as national security, which immediately puts you in a defensive posture, when you think about it. or look at his judicial philosophy. he uses all these phrases: “John McCain believes that one of the greatest threats to our liberty and the Constitutional framework that safeguards our freedoms are willful judges who usurp the role of the people and their representatives and legislate from the bench.”
wow. for those of you who don’t know, that’s code. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to translate it, but it shouldn’t be too hard.
oh the other hand, there’s http://www.barackobama.com/
perhaps characteristically, it seemed pretty wordy. But here’s his taxonomy:
Civil Rights
Defense
Disabilities
Economy
Education
Energy & Environment
Ethics
Faith
Family
Fiscal
Foreign Policy
Healthcare
Homeland Security
Immigration
Iraq
Poverty
Rural
Service
Seniors & Social Security
Technology
Taxes
Urban Policy
Veterans
Women
notice the list is quite a bit longer, but also that although the sequence implies a priority ordering, after looking at it, it turns out to be simply alphabetical. that’s kind of smart/dumb, if you know what I mean.. should I assume then that he is going to run cabinet meetings alphabetically? “.. now hold on tom, I know you have a crisis over there in xenobiology or whatever, but let’s stick with the order… go ahead agriculture guy.”
but then note what lakoff calls the “framing” of the taxonomy. it sets the stage for what you know is going to be coming — where do you stand with respect to national security? no one is opposed to it. the questions are all in the what, why and how. on the other hand, how are defense and foreign policy different subjects? do you see, the fact that they’re treated as separate topics is an implicit answer to an unasked question right there.
think about it.