Candidate McDreamy
Imagine you're sitting around one night watching TV and a pollster calls. The nice man wants you to participate in a "blind bio" poll, which means he will describe several potential presidential candidates to you and then ask you which person you'd hypothetically support. He won't give you any names, only a brief description of the candidates' biographies. You think, well, "Scrubs" is over, I might as well hear him out.
The pollster starts talking about this one guy, call him "Candidate A," who seems pretty cool: He's "an experienced candidate from the South who has been Vice President...and a U.S. Senator." Wow! Sounds great. Who could it be, though? This person has won "several awards, including an Oscar, a Grammy, and an Emmy for his documentary about global climate change." Man, you're thinking, this guy is amazing! If only someone like that would run in real life. How could I not vote for such a person?
But wait! It gets better. This mysterious hypothetical dream candidate also just won the Nobel Peace Prize! Woah! Think that's good? "This candidate has been against the Iraq war from the beginning." OMG! You are sold, especially when you learn that two of the other "blind bio" candidates "voted to authorize" the war but now say it was "wrong" or have been critical of how it's been handled. Flip-floppers. The only other candidate mentioned is a "first-term" Senator who "draws huge crowds to campaign rallies." Big whup.
You think it over for half a second and tell the pollster you're choosing "Candidate A" over those war supporters B and D and the inexperienced C. You and 35 percent of the 527 "likely Democratic voters" interviewed nationwide October 24-27 agree that this mysterious fellow is a dream candidate. (Which begs the question: who are the 65 percent of Dems who voted for the flip-floppers and non-Nobel winners?) The poll was done by Zogby International market research and was commissioned by something called "algore.org." Stay tuned to this space as our investigation into who this mysterious candidate might be continues.
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Steve Tuttle joined NEWSWEEK's Washington bureau in 1987.
Tuttle writes a bimonthly Web column while continuing also to report for the magazine on topics as varied as baseball, politics, and terrorism. He has contributed personal essays on surviving cancer, the decline of hunting, and the politics of Appalachia. He has taken on Crocs ("The case for ending our long national nightmare"), Facebook ("Being on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam"), and Evel Knievel ("If you're a man of a certain age, then you spent a lot of Sunday afternoons building ramps and wearing capes").
In addition to his editorial duties, Tuttle oversees logistics for NEWSWEEK's coverage of the Democratic and Republican national political conventions, as well as the Olympics.
Tuttle graduated in 1983 from the College of William and Mary with a degree in English literature. He previously worked at The Recorder, a tiny paper deep in the hills of western Virginia.
He is the only NEWSWEEK employee who had a pet bear as a child.
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