As of this writing, there has been only one announced Presidential candidate for the 2016 Presidential election. Already, the US Media and major news sites (backed by large advertisers) are rattling the cages by focusing on political drama and gossip.
In an ideal democracy, an educated citizen would pick his candidate by comparing his own public policy with the pool of candidate choices. Unfortunately, there are complications in the US electoral system that narrows down the candidate choices to only a handful of people, and most of the policy information of the candidates is drowned by electoral drama that is continuously blasted by the media.
The best way to handle this jungle of crazy is to shutout all irrelevant information, focus on the policy positions of the candidates, and if possible make a rational, non-emotional choice in the ballot box and move on. While there is a lot at stake in a Presidential election, there is no need to be heavily invested emotionally, especially if those emotions can be exploited by the campaigns or the media to sway votes. Voting based primarily on policy position will insure that the voter has chosen his candidate without external manipulation.
Unfortunately, traditional media and the web will be soon filled with distracting elements and finding a clear, comparable policy position of the Presidential candidates will be difficult. Thus, I am announcing the creation of the “DS NETS – Policy Positions of Presidential candidates 2016”. There will be a new section on this website that will comprise on policy position data on presidential candidates. All the data on policy positions will come directly from the candidates’ own websites and not from other sources, such as Super PACs and other media outlets.
The motivation for creating a new section is to educate myself and others on the candidates’ relevant political positions without all the noise surrounding an election. This will be a long work in progress, but hopefully other readers can find this upcoming section useful in their electoral decisions.
