Candidate ratings don't reveal much about the next president

With the Democratic National Convention in full swing and the Republicans eagerly awaiting their turn, political silly season has officially commenced. That means it's time for everybody with an axe to grind to rate the candidates' positions on issues near and dear to their hearts. Based on those positions, and by peering into crystal balls and divining the future from the entrails of sacrificial animals, we then forecast the candidates' likely performance in the White House.

There's just one problem with this approach: It's crap.

I've played this game before, myself, assessing presidential candidates' sensitivity to concerns about free speech, privacy, due process, the right to bear arms, etc. for the online publisher that employed me in 1996 and 2000. I skipped 2004, though that year might have proved a bit easier than most.

My 2000 comparison is no longer available online, but I remember digging through the stances taken by Bush and Gore (as well as Harry Browne, Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan) and concluding that, when it came to the two big contenders, the difference was more a matter of emphasis than overall impact. That is, Bush might be terrible on reproductive freedom, but he was decent on guns, while Gore sucked eggs on the right to bear arms but supported a woman's right to choose.

But that was before 9/11.

Y'see, all those positions the candidates take mean very little until they've actually been tested and had to make some hard choices. When President Bush was put to the test, it turned out that legal niceties like due process, privacy and the humane treatment of prisoners didn't matter to him much at all. But we had no way of knowing that until he was put in a position to respond to a crisis.

Does that mean a theoretical President Gore would have been better? It's hard to believe that any serious contender for the U.S. presidency would have been worse than George W. Bush, but we'll never really know. After all, in his pre-prophet-of-environmental-doom incarnation, Gore was part of the administration that produced many of the legal proposals that were later taken off the shelf and plugged into the PATRIOT Act.

But Gore was later critical of the PATRIOT Act, so maybe he had second thoughts.

Or maybe not being in power gives you a different perspective than when you're the head honcho.

Candidates can certainly telegraph their future performance, but the message is often mixed -- and we tend to see what we want to see. Woodrow Wilson, whose administration was perhaps the most abusive of individual rights in American history, wrote for decades in favor of greatly expanding the power of the presidency. But Wilson is also known for saying, "Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it."

Which was the real Wilson? We only found out when he started throwing critics of his administration into prison.

Francis Biddle, FDR's Attorney General, remarked as the government was sticking Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, "The Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president."

And "war" tends to get interpreted rather broadly by politicians; wars on poverty, drugs and terror can become justifications for nasty actions -- all just for the duration of the "emergency," of course.

With Barack Obama and John McCain, we have two presidential contenders who have served their political careers as legislators -- one person among many. We really don't have the slightest idea how they'll act when placed in positions of executive power. Will the ultimate winner of the White House wield his vast power as an angel or a monster? I suspect that even he doesn't know.

In the days to come, you'll see plenty of ratings of the candidates' stances on a variety of issues, including those involving the preservation of at least a modicum of liberty in this fading republic. But don't expect those comparisons to be much of a guide to how the next president will ultimately behave when put to the test.