How Conservative Are You?

Yesterday, in my feeble attempts to think around the splitting headache with which I woke up, I came across someone's blog sporting a link to an "interactive quiz". I very rarely click on these, but I couldn't resist seeing as how the quiz was compiled by the Center for American Progress and it entitled "How Progressive Are You?"

Apparently, not so much.

On my first attempt, when I was actually TRYING to answer the 40 questions honestly, I scored 115 out of a possible 400. 400 being Joseph Stalin (...I meant to say "ultra liberal/progressive") and 0 being the guy that makes Ronald Reagan look like Joseph Stalin. According to the lies (...there I go again, I meant to say "statistics") C.A.P. has put together, I qualify as "very conservative". I was expecting a pop up message that said something like "Are you related to Attila the Hun?" or "Bourgeois Capitalist Pig"; but, apparently, they are trying to keep things civil.

C.A.P. says that the mean score for conservative Republicans is 160.9, and the mean score for all Americans is 209.5. Setting aside for the moment that all Americans haven't taken their little quiz, I am encouraged by the fact that "all Americans" are mostly moderate. Which is something I've believed for a long time.

This quiz reminded me of a quiz my college government professor had the class take. The quiz purported to tell you where you fell on a four axis political spectrum (liberal, conservative, populist and libertarian). After taking the test once, it was pretty obvious to me how to manipulate the test to get a particular outcome based on the way the questions were written. I bet the professor I could put the dot dead center in the middle of the the axis. He didn't believe me until I did it in front of him. He didn't like that.

So, I couldn't leave the C.A.P. quiz well enough alone either. If you decide to take it, you will notice that some of the questions are written in a decidedly slanted way. You will also note that the 0 to 10 agree/disagree rating scale makes it easy to "tip the scale" one way or the other.

On my second attempt to take the test, I went all out ultra conservative and came back with a score of 30 out of 400. Obviously, I "missed" on three questions. I'm pretty sure I know which ones they were, but it's time for me to stop messing with it and move on to other things.

Y'all go have some fun and screw with their percentages.