It’s a little late for Valentine’s Day, but here’s kind of an interesting exercise in testing your emotional preferences for the top four presidential candidates. Via Pandagon, here’s the Implicit Association Test. It asks you at the start of the test what your candidate preferences are, and then puts you through a rapid-response drill involving photographs of the candidates and associative words.
Leaving aside questions about a methodology that seems to correlate hand-eye coordination with emotional preferences somehow, and an observation that some of the photos of Obama and Clinton in the test were rather unflattering, Historiann is more than a little disturbed to report her results: While Hillary Clinton came out as my top candidate emotionally (natch), Huckabee and McCain were dead even with each other not very far behind her. (I kind of get that with McCain, whose photos as a young Navy officer strongly resemble a close member of my family when he was a young man, but Huck?) Obama came out at the bottom, much to my surprise–perhaps I’ve been overly influenced by some of his supporters on the internets, who seem to be hatin’ on Hillary more than they love their man. All of the candidates in my preference profile were fairly closely grouped together, within 2-3 points of each other, so perhaps these relative rankings aren’t important. It might be fun to revisit this test later in the campaign.
How do your intellectual preferences square with your emotions? (The test is pretty painless and takes only 10 minutes or less, depending on how speedy you are.) Any big surprises for you?
Historiann 
For me, Obama was way at the top, then in the middle Huckabee was just ahead of Hillary, with McCain way at the bottom.
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Huckabee appeared ahead of McCain (surprising), but both were way behind Obama (not surprising), and Clinton far below (where Huckabee should be found–a little surprising). Lots of typing errors from trying to move too fast cause me to distrust the results.
As a confirmed Clinton hater, I find at interesting that media coverage of her over the past month has moved me towards possible acceptance of her as the next President. Ironic, given her somewhat hostile historic relationship with the media. I’ve seen Michelle Obama on the television more often than her husband, and haven’t seem Bill at all. It seems almost as if it’s Hillary vs. Michelle. Both came to Spokane, while Barack went to Seattle, so that may have skewed local coverage.
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Huckabee must just have a likeable mug–it looks like he came out much farther up than any of us would have guessed in all of our attempts at the survey! Very interesting. He *is* a likeable seeming guy and a great campaigner–I just wish he was on our side!
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I was a little surprised by my overly negative reaction to McCain, but now I think maybe it’s because I view Huckabee as harmless and McCain, being the presumptive Republican nominee, as a threat.
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I could not figure out how to take that test, so I closed the window before finishing. So much for the PhD
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Rad–can I sign you up for remedial typing? (Don’t you have some kids hanging around your house who can help you with teh video game?)
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I finally figured out how to take the test. Clinton ranked the highest, then Obama, then Huckabee, and McCain was a long-way down.
It’s too bad for Clinton that I refuse to participate in acts that lend legitimacy to the corrupt federal government of an oppressive nation state.
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