What's your dream scenario for Election 2008?

Mine is...

Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination

Rudy Guliani gets the Republican nomination

Micheal Bloomberg seeing the high negativity numbers for both candidates sees an oppurtunity and joins the race. Polls have repeatedly shown that he would siphon more votes from Guliani than from Hillary. And even if he draws support from both sides so that no one gets 270 votes, the Democrat controlled house will get to appoint the next president, so there's little reason for him not to run in that scenario given his political leanings.

A popular christian conversative, angered by the idea of having three socially liberal prochoice new yorkers in the race sees an oppurtunity and joins the race drawing more christian conservatives away from the republican party.

For me, this is the ideal, to have four candidates in the race, each representing the three most popular of the four true political ideologies and to finally fractionalize both the political parties.

Socially Liberal and Economically Liberal - Hillary

Socially Liberal and Economically Centrist (Fiscally Conservative and Sees That Free Trade is a Good Thing But Compassionate to the Plight of the Working Class As Well) - Bloomberg

Socially Centrist and Economically Conservative - Guliani

Socially Conservative and Economically Conservative - Christian Conservative

Bloomberg, once his out of the box evidence based approach to soliving policy problems gets national coverage, in no small part due to his billion dollar campaign, in my dream scenario wins the presidency.

I think Bloomberg has a lot of appeal once you look at how he governs. He is a self described Liberal Libertarian and has called himself a technocrat.

He cares about the plight of the working class and the poor, but instead of just doing the same old things that haven't really solving their underlying problems (tariffs, protectionism, just throwing more money at the problem), he tries novel solutions based on solid economic, psychological and scientific evidence and principles. He bases his policies on facts and evidence and again and again tries totally unorthodox and controversial approaches to solving problems, approaches that economists and psychologists have shown to be effective again and again. And no matter how unpopular his policies were initially, they almost always wound up working exactly as he said they would and he won back the criticizers.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1632736-1,00.html

I would love to see some evidence based public policy come out of the white house by having a technocrat in office.

When you actually consider and reason through all the evidence for some time, I thinks that's around where you end up.

The lower class of americans do face far more challenges than the upper class.

And by helping them get past these obstacles, by making sure that anyone willing to work can earn a living wage (in part by lowering the cost of living by providing healthcare) even the homeless can become productive members of society. This in turn would help all of society, even it's richest members.

But at the same time, not everything liberals argue for is correct. Free trade policies DO work, protectionism stifles both our own economy and the global economy and overall does more harm than good. And poverty and poor education don't go away just by throwing more and more money at them. You have to try novel approaches based on sound proven economic incentives and psychologic principles to get to the root of these problems.

That's why I would describe myself as a "Liberal Libertarian" or a "Technocrat (One Who Goes By Evidence Rather Than Ideology)"

Do you?

Oftentimes, it seems like politicians say and do what FEELS right or what is most politically easy to sell, or most politically convenient rather than doing what all evidence points as the solution that actually works.

Sanctioning a country because we disagree with them FEELS right. Opening up discourse with them and working out a fair comprimise doesn't even though it's been shown to be effective more often than war.

Doctors are required to practice Evidence based medicine. If they don't do what is supported by the evidence, they get sued for it and can even lose their license.

The same isn't expected of politicians.

This is the reason that Micheal Bloomberg as President is looking more and more appealing to me. He's a self declared technocrat. And the policies he institued went with the evidence, and though unpopular, worked, again and again.

This means that he will do what the evidence says he should do, even if it is unpopular. And that's exactly what he did in New York, he cut a lot of programst that weren't working well and raised taxes to put the city back in black. His polls sank when he did it. He took a very hard stance against pollution and global warming, smoking, and banned trans-fats, moves that were unpopular at the time. But guess what, it worked. And New York's economy is much better than it was when he came into office.