What's an Independent voter to do?

Andrew Mooers' recent blog http://activerain.com/blogsview/335717/After-Awhile-The-Presidential touted a website that let the user take a quiz about central issues in the Presidential race and see which candidate's views were really most similar to one's own. What a great idea! I made a beeline for that quiz, on the Washington Post site.

See, I really do not know which candidate I think would make the best president ( although I've got a couple of ideas along the lines of "oh, please not ........" ). The reason I've always been registered Independent is that my views tend not to line up with "party platforms" at all.

For instance, I've never understood why

• Republicans immediately assume that pro-life=supporting the death penalty=opposing a ban on assault weapons
• while Democrats imagine that concern about global warming implies favoring partial-birth abortion and opposing school vouchers,
• while I can't, for the life of me, see why these positions should be inextricably linked!

 Thus, my Independent status, which leaves me chronically agreeing with candidates from one party on one issue and from the other party on another issue, and sometimes disagreeing with both.

So I was ecstatic at the idea of a quiz that let me evaluate what each candidate said about each issue, evaluate whose reponse was closest to my own, and even weight each question as to the importance I gave that issue, before telling me which candidate best expressed my views!

So I trotted (electronically speaking) right over to that Washington Post quiz to figure out which candidate was my own "best match."

Was I disappointed! You see, I could, indeed, compare my vews with each candidate. But I had to first select either the Democratic candidatee (big 3 only) or the Republican candidates. The I was forced to "agree" with one of the candidate's responses. But I only got the responses of either Republicans (in one version of the quiz) or Democrats (in the other version).

Let me give an example, so you'll see what I mean: On the question "Do you support restrictions on purchase of guns,"  while I was on the "Democratic" side, I had to "agree" with one of the various "yes" answers, while on the "Republican" version, I had to "agree" with one of the various "no" answers. Obviously, I really agree with either yes or no, not both. But the quiz wasn't set up to allow me to see the responses of the Democrats and the Republicans at once, so that I could really choose a response I did agree with on each question. The same "party-line" uniformity occurred for questions regarding affirmative action, abortion, the gay marriage amendment, civil unions for gays, etc., etc.

So I ended up with a Republican candidate I had "agreed" most with, and a Democrat I had "agreed" most with, but, in reality, a fair percentage of those "agreements" were totally bogus, and entered only to allow me to proceed to the next question, where I hoped possibly to have an honest answer available! So,as a voter, I'm no closer to figuring out which candidate for President is really the one I agree most with.

So, folks at the Washington Post, I have a suggestion. How about publishing a new quiz, using the same questions, with all the responses from the candidates of BOTH parties visible at the same time, on the same screen, to choose from? This sure would be a help to those of us whose thought don't conform to party-line ideology!

Or am I the only one out there??