Find objective ways to assess candidates

Slowly but surely all those things we have believed are being tested by new revelations and some of our revered personalities are being exposed as "just human beings." Bill Cosby, whose reputation was bigger than life, has proven to have drugged some women for sexual purposes and the Duggar family is not really perfect after all. Next thing we know it will turnout that Father "really didn't know best" and television just made unlikely heros of actors for the purposes of entertainment and keeping viewership high.

The big gap in the reality show market caused by the loss of the TLC Channel's "19 Children and Counting" could be filled by a new offering from the Republican Party. It could be called "14 Candidates and Counting." That must be another sign that it is the political season. One thing we can count on during this pre-primary period is the prospect of every candidate being scrutinized by the media. If we are observant and devote some time to the task, we can learn a lot more about the candidates than we might ever have otherwise have known because the media will delve into their backgrounds for coverage purposes. My personal desires are to learn exactly how "dead broke" the Clintons were coming out of the White House and how many Harvard Law School graduates we have on both parties' candidate lists. Any might be too many.

Whether we like Donald Trump or not, he will bring out information on the wealth factor of every candidate just because he is not afraid to discuss his own wealth. What else would have forced Jeb Bush to reveal all those years of income tax filings. Donald Trump may even push the Clinton Foundation issue to the point they must reveal some of the foreign contributions to that organization and it could prove embarrassing to Hillary's campaign.

So far at our house we have heard one-on-one in-depth interviews with Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders, Republican Carly Fiorina and the Donald (Trump) himself. There will be plenty of opportunity to hear others as we progress in the campaign, but the major uncertainty lies in how many new candidates the two parties will produce. There hasn't been a lot of talk about additional Democrats and I'm not sure if there are four or five actually announced participants in that contest. The Republicans, however, have continued to talk about two additional governors, John Kasich from Ohio and Scott Walker from Wisconsin, joining the Republican race. Maybe they feel 16 is some kind of magic number. When we know for sure about their decisions, we can divide the Republicans by those that are, or were previously, senators, those who were, or are members of the House of Representatives, and those current and past governors. There are, of course, others such as medical doctor and former CEO Carly Fiorina who come without a political history and are "special cases" to be considered. Since experience is going to be a big factor with the unusually large Republican field, it is going to be important to evaluate the candidates fairly.

To compare "apples to apples and not apples to oranges" where political qualifications are concerned, maybe we need to be working on a candidate score sheet for our personal evaluation. We might consider being a governor one term worth maybe five points and being re-elected for a second term an additional 15 points. Being a one-term senator could be worth five points and each time they were re-elected we could add an additional 10 points per term. House members so seldom have opposition they could get one point per year. We will need some method of accounting for seniority in any position, and we must have a way to add or subtract for our own view of the wealth factor, etc.

We will probably need some objective means of comparing a two-term governor like Mike Huckabee who should get some credit for his television show, but was never a senator, with Governor John Kasich of Ohio who also served 18 years in the House of Representatives, where he chaired the House Budget Committee during the 1997 balanced budget deal. As noted before, those without a long political resume must be evaluated on another set of criteria.

Depending on our own priority, we could have a negative value for being too wealthy and in our equation we need to have a numerical number for their view on closing the border and/or giving citizenship to illegals, and an (objective) number to assign for how we view their foreign policy experience. Traveling to the Middle East for instance might be worth a couple of points, but serving as secretary of state as Hillary Clinton has done could warrant a higher score on exposure to foreign policy opportunities if one sees that as a highly important issue.

Any way we obtain objective valuations on obvious concerns to us doesn't force us to vote for that person, but certainly makes us think in terms not always considered when we listen to the news media's assessments.

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Editor's note: Leo Lynch is an award-winning columnist. He is a native of Benton County and has deep roots in Northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at prtnews@nwa online.com.

Editorial on 07/15/2015