The Washington Post has a very cool “Candidate Selector Tool” online. It takes answers that candidates gave to a range of questions, and lets you pick the one that you most agree with. Then, you can weight the importance of the issue. The result is a score.

I went through the Republican version, and came out schizophrenic, of course:

Mitt Romney: 20 pts
John McCain: 17 pts
Fred Thompson: 14 pts
Rudy Guiliani: 12 pts
Mike Huckabee: 6 pts
Ron Paul: 3 pts

I don’t really conclude very much from this. Substantively, the candidates are the same on most of these issues. The answer that I selected came down to rhetoric more than any real differences between them.

And I’m also not sure that the survey captured all of the issues. There were only two budget questions, and one of those focused on taxes, so there really wasn’t much on the tax issue at all. There also wasn’t as much as I would have expected on terror or security.

I’ll likely do the Dem version just for fun and update this post later.

UPDATE: So I did the Dem version, too. The results are amusing.

Hillary Clinton: 33 pts
Barrack Obama: 30 pts
Bill Richardson: 18 pts
John Edwards: 17 pts
Chris Dodd: 12 pts

The questions were pretty similar to the ones for GOPers, but the answers from the candidates were very different. I just did the best I could.

Jim: It’s tempting to call Marshall a closet Hillary-backer — notice she was 13 points higher than his favorite Republican! — but if the test is really based more on the candidates’ rhetoric than their records, then it’s not surprising that a righty like Marshall would prefer the two frontrunners, since they’re the only ones not trying to get traction by pandering to the base. Hillary and Obama can afford to sound centrist once in a while, while even Bill Richardson, at least a righty on the gun issue, has to try to sound like a poster to Daily Kos.