Dennis Kucinich, the Unknown Front Runner

Never even heard of him? Well, he's probably your first choice for President.

There is a nice little one-page website available, that lets you vote on the issues that matter to you, and then tells you which Presidential candidates out there come closest to your views. It's a great tool because it gives you a quick, accurate list of the candidates that should be your favorites, according to the issues they support and oppose, without all that ... you know ... research.

But here's the interesting point. This website also gives some statistical history of how people have voted. As of this writing, 153,350 people have completed the quiz. Of those people, more than half (57% in fact) have discovered that Dennis Kucinich is the candidate they should be supporting.

Now, that's not 57% for Kucinich and 43% for some other candidate. The site considers the platforms of 18 established Presidential contenders. Dennis Kucinich comes up as Americans' number one choice more than every other candidate combined. To clarify, this is not 57% of Democrats, or 57% of closet Neocons, or 57% of disillusioned former Ron Paul supporters (like me). Of everyone who has taken this quiz, over half want the same things for America as Dennis Kucinich.

So, if the issues actually mattered, and if Americans looked at the whole field--instead of just the 3 or 4 candidates the mainstream media tells them to, and if Americans voted their conscience, instead of selecting the lesser of the two most popular evils ... Dennis Kucinich would be the runaway favorite. The actual election would just be a formality. Yeah, I know, that's an awful lot of 'ifs'. However, every one of those 'ifs' should be true ... if this is still the Democracy we like to think it is. So why is Kucinich still languishing in 73rd place?

The fact is, when I took this quiz, I was a die-hard Ron Paul supporter. Of the candidates I was familiar with, Ron Paul was head-and-shoulders above the pack. But then, I had never heard of this Kucinich fellow. So I did some research and found that, in fact, Dennis Kucinich actually does stand for the things I believe in, almost completely ... and quite a lot better than Ron Paul, in fact. So, after a bit of waffling, I switched horses (and political parties) midstream. It's ok; you can do that. I checked.

So here's the site.

Pick Your Candidate.

Check it out, it's worth five minutes to find out if you're actually backing the best man (or woman) for the job. And if it turns out that Kucinich is your pick, too (and odds are, he will be), then don't be afraid to support him. He's only an underdog as long as we keep thinking he is.

A couple quick notes about the 'Pick Your Candidate' website. It was put together by a regular guy, 'spare time' sort of thing. The actual computer programming code that runs the site and calculates the results is completely open-source and transparent, meaning that anyone who knows a bit about programming (such as myself) can look at how the quiz works and clearly see that there are no hidden tricks to skew the results. The candidates' stances on the issues are determined by their actual statements of position, as recorded by www.2decide.com, an excellent, non-partisan service that tracks these things.