Economist Endorsements

Wow. The Economist has posted its recent US Presidential endorsements and they sure are . . . idiosyncratic. They went for Bill Clinton in 1992, Bob Dole (!) in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. If you can identify any actual human beings who exhibited this voting pattern, I’d be fascinated to talk to them.

Meanwhile, it’d be interesting to read retrospective endorsements. You have to figure that a magazine that wound up endorsing Kerry in 2004 has some significant regrets about the fact that Bush won in 2000. So what were they thinking? Did any great tragedy befall the nation on account of Bob Dole’s failure? Would four more years of George H.W. Bush really have been so horrible? My read on this list is that gauche as it seems, blind partisan voting seems to produce perfectly reasonable results compared to efforts at judicious balance.