Folks, I’m neither a Democrat, nor a Republican. But my mom asked me to give her an unbiased, factual rundown on the political platforms – so what my mother wants, my mother gets! Here you go Mom…
I’m making the presumption that the two candidates who are going to actually be running for President are Barack Obama, and John McCain. So, below I’ve taken the liberty of narrowing down all the data to these two guys. What you need to do is line up as many of your political ideal matches and then you can rationally choose who you are voting for.
Here are the candidates views on a variety of issues:
| Issue |  Barack Obama |
 John McCain |
|---|---|---|
| Abortion is a woman’s right | Strongly Favors | Opposes |
| Require hiring more women & minorities | Strongly Favors | Favors |
| Same-sex domestic partnership benefits | Strongly Favors | Favors |
| Teacher-led prayer in public schools | Opposes | Favors |
| Death Penalty | Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| Mandatory Three Strikes sentencing laws | Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| Absolute right to gun ownership | Strongly Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| More federal funding for health coverage | Favors | Favors |
| Privatize Social Security | Strongly Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| Parents choose schools via vouchers | No opinion | Strongly Favors |
| Replace coal & oil with alternatives | Strongly Favors | Favors |
| Drug use is immoral: enforce laws against it | Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| Allow churches to provide welfare services | Favors | Strongly Favors |
| Repeal tax cuts on wealthy | Strongly Favors | Opposes |
| Illegal immigrants earn citizenship | Strongly Favors | Favors |
| Support & expand free trade | Opposes | Strongly Favors |
| Expand the armed forces | Favors | Favors |
| Stricter limits on political campaign funds | Strongly Favors | Strongly Favors |
| The Patriot Act harms civil liberties | Strongly Favors | Strongly Opposes |
| US out of Iraq | Favors | Strongly Opposes |
There are independent organizations that rate the candidates based upon their voting records. The candidates have to have enough votes in a particular area to actually get rated, but here are the ones I’m aware of:
| Ratings | Barack Obama |
John McCain |
|---|---|---|
| HRC rating (Gay Rights) | 89% | 33% |
| ACLU rating (Civil Rights) | 0% | |
| NAACP Rating (Affirmative Action) | 100% | 7% |
| NCJA rating (Criminal Justice) | 75% | 85% |
| NEA rating (Public Education) | 45% | |
| CAF rating (Energy Independence) | 100% | 17% |
| LCV rating (Environment) | 53% | |
| Christian Coalition rating (Pro-family) | 83% | |
| APHA rating (Health Care) | 25% | |
| USBC rating (Close Borders) | 8% | 18% |
| AU record (Church-State Separation) | 100% | 33% |
| CTJ rating (Progressive Taxation) | 100% | 50% |
Barack Obama is a Hard-Core Liberal.
John McCain is a Populist-Leaning Conservative.
All of the data here has come from a direct comparison of records as reported by OnTheIssues.org. Here is John McCain’s page, and Barack Obama’s.
They also have a VoteMatch quiz you can take which tells you which candidate you most closely match up with philosophically. Interestingly, I had a 48% match with Obama and a 30% match with McCain.
{ 62 comments… read them below or add one }
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This post isn’t going to sway anyone (and it probably will start some mini flame wars), but it does seem fair from what I know of both candidates. Good job on getting that done (which was the intent of the post).
No but it makes things clearer for us foreigners to see who is who and what they stand for :)
Kim:)
It makes it clear what they think you want them to stand for :-)
Thanks for posting, but unfortunately this confirms my suspicion that I don’t want either person in office. Oh well. Whee for two party systems.
“Repeal tax cuts on wealthy”
That’s a heavily biased assessment of the tax cuts in question.
(to be fair, however, I appreciate your otherwise fair, rational and fact-oriented approach to the matter!)
For those who are interested, these are the facts I felt were relevant to my comment:
“Treasury Department analysts credit President Bush’s tax cuts with shifting a larger share of the individual income taxes paid to higher income taxpayers. In 2005, says the Treasury, when most of the tax cut provisions are fully in effect (e.g., lower tax rates, the $1,000 child credit, marriage penalty relief), the projected tax share for lower-income taxpayers will fall, while the tax share for higher-income taxpayers will rise.
# The share of taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers will fall from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent.
# The share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers will rise from 32.3 percent to 33.7 percent.
# The average tax rate for the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers falls by 27 percent as compared to a 13 percent decline for taxpayers in the top 1 percent.”
There are many sources, this was the most concise, and the source of the citation above:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/incometaxandtheirs/a/whopaysmost.htm
Speaking as someone from the UK I would pick Obama as the lesser of two evils.
The two key points I have issue with as far as Obama is concerned are:
1. How many more people does the US of A want to see die because of your restrictive trade practises. Mny countries in Africa have stated that they would not need the Aid funding if they were not prohibited from trading on an equal footing with the USA and Europe. But, of course, it’s in the interests of the USA to keep those countries dependent on Aid. You only have to take a look at how the money allocated to rebuild Iraq was used to see that.
2. Why does Obama see any need to expand the armed forces? This could only mean an intention to expand the USA’s global influence. Unless the USA foriegn policy shapes up, this is bad news for the world – or is there some place that Americans aren’t hated enough by American military standards and he just has to send troops there?
It is, however, some relief to see his stance on gun ownership.
A notable ommission is any policy regarding the signing of the Kyoto treaty from either candidate. With 25% of the worlds polution coming from the USA, isn’t it time a President took some real responsibility?
So what do you think of “the lesser of two evils” now?
Mccain
abortion (flip/flopped)
stricter limits on political campaigns(has a lot of lobbyist)
Obama
right to gun ownership(flip flopped)
expand the armed forces(I never heard this, but could be true)
It is pretty good but on these issue above I take issue with
vote for obama!
yes we can
Just wanted to say thank you very much for this article because it helped me out a lot with my gov’t homework because i couldn’t find the similarities and differences between the parties on their ideas.
So again thank you this was incredibly helpful
So, this means Obama favors killing babies, taking your guns, and raising your taxes? Wow.
this means, obama wants to murder the innocent….lets the guilty live, and when they get out of prison we wont have the guns to protect ourselves because, obama took them away……oh and we will be heading straight towards a dictatorship
This comment, while likely just kidding, is unfortunate because it is a perfect example of the extremist rhetoric that is used by both sides of the political debate repeatedly.
Saying that Obama wants to murder the innocent is as ridiculous as saying that McCain wants to murder the innocent since he flew over Vietnam and killed a bunch of people.
The real discussion is whether these candidates believe a woman has the right to choose between having an abortion and not. McCain does not believe she should even have a choice – no matter the consequences. So, if someone forcibly held a woman down and purposely impregnated her, he would force her to carry the baby to term. Presumably because the conception was “God’s will”. Obama takes the other side of the debate and, though he doesn’t want – and likely would not personally choose – abortion, he believes the woman has the choice whether to carry the pregnancy or not.
I’m rather surprised by the biblical based argument against abortion, because if you believe in God, you must also believe in Satan. And if a demon possessed human were to forcibly impregnate a woman, I would think that a God fearing human would want to abort the spawn of evil. Christians burned many, many women at the stake believing they were witches – and inhabited by evil – so why would you not rid the world of demon spawn? I mean, you wouldn’t have aborted Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler or other diabolical humans if you had the ability to?
You can’t have it both ways. You must either allow women to protect the world from the potential evil festering in their wombs, or you must allow it to spring forth and wreak untold havoc on the world. What’ll it be? I say, trust the woman to make the choice.
John
That is the way I read it!
I can’t believe that anyone who calls him/herself a Christian could in anyway support a platform endorsed by national Democrats. IT IS ANTI-CHRIST!
Senator McCain was working for you to help provide you with the freedom to voice your disrespect without reprisal.
You should get down on your knees and express gratitude to him and all the other veterans that returned and for those who were unfortunate enough to not return.
Actually McCain makes the exception for abortion if the woman was raped or if the child endangers the mother.
While I believe a woman has every right to make almost any decision regarding her own body (remember that suicide is illegal), the issue for most Pro-Lifers is exactly that: what is living inside of a pregnant woman is a human baby. Period. If you believe this, and I don’t believe anyone honestly doesn’t, then this human baby deserves the RIGHT to LIVE and who are we to decide which babies live and die? How about when they’re 2 years old and driving us nuts – can we abort them then?
Non Christians burned a lot of people at the stake too. Let’s not judge an organization by the sins of it’s members. Christians never claimed to be perfect and of course any Christain in his right mind does not endorse burning people. How about a real argument?
The last part of your comment is the most disturbing. So we should abort babies based on whether or not we think they’ll turn out to be criminals?
I do think you need to correct something… based on his ads, Obama supports cutting the military, not expanding it.
ummm yea a few of the issues are horribly wrong, like mccain favoring more federal healthcare funding..he’s for starting programs that help individuals fund it themselves, not the federal government funding anything…
He wants to cut military in Iraq, and deployed military. Not cut it as whole He just wants to move our military around somewhat. Brings soldiers on their 4th and 5th tours home and get troops out of Iraq and into afganistan. Sorry if spelling/grammar is poor it is late.
I can’t believe that you think have the authority to call an innocent child the devil’s spawn. Eventhough the child was not conceived under circumstances that are positive, it in no way reflects on that child…how is it that you think that child is evil because it was conceived in sin. Do you think, then, that every child conceived in sin is the devil’s spawn? That any child that is conceived out of wedlock is the devil’s spawn? There are many people today who are outstanding citizens who are the product of rape or other “unethical” ways, I just can’t believe that you think you have the right to label them as you have… It’s disgusting!!
This person obviously is ludacris, this data is insufficient, all of this is just pointing directly that you support McCain more than Obama. Who supports the middle class? Obama, who supports taxing the miidle class, and not the high-class? McCain, say what you know, mean what you say!!!!
“We as Americans are basing our country upon the morals of racism, discrimination, and segregation. When will we take a stand, a stand meant to be acted on. When will we not just sing the National Anthem, but mean it. I recall it says, we are the land of the free and the home the brave. When will we make this the land of the free and the home of the brave, or was it ever?”
Quote By: Philanthropist Shakeal Moore
and Activist Samuel Buncabi
If you don’t want the same,
The insane,
Nor the not ready for change,
Then don’t vote for McCain
Obama is not the Anti-Christ, how do we know McCain isn’t? We need to look more at what they stand for, than their color. I looked in the history book and I saw 43 presidents, and not one was black, yet we try to predict and say Obama will be a bad president. So, let me tell you that you aren’t ready for change, if you were you wouldn’t still be caught up in racism discrimination, nor segregation.
Now is the time to take a stand, a stand for change, change what America badly needs. Jesus Loves.
You poor man. You have been duped by the man-hating/ashamed to be female feminists in this country – very different from real feminists, but squeeky wheels, nonetheless. Your view that unborn babies are evil is completely irrational and illogical. Noone can determine that a baby is innately evil. It’s not sin that sends us to hell, but arrogance. You are in interesting company: the Communist Chinese agree with you that you can be your own God. They also believe that any more than one child in a family is innately “evil” to the government. They have enforced the “one child only” law for many, many years, now. This is what so many Chinese woman have told me: if they find themselves pregnant with another child, they must hide in a village where they hope there will be no government “rats.” If found out, they are arrested for being pregnant, handcuffed and drugged so that they will not resist, brought to a local medical office, their legs secured in the splayed position, and they are raped with cold, metal tools to extract and dismember their baby within their wombs, regardless of its age. Women, in their natural state, are considered dangerous and unsafe, just as in this country – thus the advent of the “safe sex” marketing ploy (under the guise of protection against certain STDs). Women and men in this country are taught that women, naturally, are dangerous and something to be protected against. The Planned Parenthood/NOW feminists are the most man/women-hating of all, as they perpetuate this slap in the face to real women. They also target minorities – just check out where their clinics are. And they are “pro-choice?” They are simply pro-your choice to kill your baby, not pro-choice to have your baby, or at least a pittance of their multi-billion dollar industry would go for homes for unwed mothers or healthcare for women who choose to have their babies – nowhere to be found.
Don’t believe me when I say all of this, ask Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was co-founder in 1969 of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws — NARAL — later renamed the National Abortion Rights Action League. He was also the former director of New York’s City’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, then the largest abortion clinic in the world. In the late 1970′s he turned against abortion to become a prominent pro-life advocate, authoring Abortion America and producing the powerfully revealing video, “The Silent Scream.” Dr. Nathanson is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York Medical College and a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University.
As director of the world’s largest abortion clinic and the nation’s most prominent abortionist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson presided over 60,000 abortions. He even aborted his own baby. As co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League he helped make abortion legal.
Then, in a conversion that made headlines and astonished both sides of the abortion debate, he renounced his profession to become a pro-life advocate.
Please check out “The Silent Scream.” You can find it on-line. It may change your heart. We need real men – educated, caring, intelligent men to fight for those whose screams we refuse to hear. Thousands of women are now gaining courage to step forward following their own abortions and become vocal about how toxic and corrosive the abortion experience has been and continues to be for them. Read some of their moving stories at the Rachel’s Vineyard website and related links.
-from a woman impregnated during a date-rape, who was then rendered sterile by a legal, well-established abortion doctor during an attempted abortion.
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