Best President for Nation Might Not Be Dream Date

By MARIEL GARZA

WHO is Mike

Gravel, and why do I suddenly want to date him?

I thought I was keeping up with the presidential primary races until I took ABC’s Match-O-Matic, a strictly nonscientific online political quiz that hooks you up with your ideal candidate based on his or her past performance and your political preferences. It operates not unlike an online dating site.

I was sure I’d be paired with Hillary, or maybe even Dennis Kucinich, that wild and crazy peace-loving, UFO-seeing candidate. No, it seems my dream candidate isn’t someone I’d even heard of. According to Match-O-Matic, Mike Gravel is the guy for me. (I don’t even want to talk about Match-O-Matic’s third choice for me, John McCain.) To this I replied as any informed voter might: “Huh?”

At first, I wondered if this Mike Gravel person wasn’t just a put- on. Maybe this “quiz” was a well-disguised and elaborate advertising campaign for a new eponymous made-for-TV movie about a lovable but tough-as-nails senator and his antics in the cutthroat world of presidential primary campaigns. You just couldn’t make up a better name.

Gravel, though, is a real person. He’s a former senator from Alaska from 26 years back who fought against the war and seems to have single-handedly held back the dark forces of the draft against the evil Republicans.

I know this because Gravel has a Web site on which I can read all about it. Plus a link to a MySpace page, a Facebook profile and Gravel’s own YouTube channel, on which one can watch a video of the 77-year-old huff it up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a re-creation of the famous scene of “Rocky,” or a rocking anti- war video with 36-year-old footage of a young and handsome Gravel crying over the loss of life in the Vietnam War. Wow. That’s my kinda man, I mean, candidate.

If it seems like presidential politics has become another form of Internet dating, that’s because it’s looking a lot like one.

The lightning leaps of technology in just the last 15 years have shaped the presidential campaign season into very technologically distinct years. In 1992, the rise of the cable news brought much more round-the-clock coverage of the candidates, and surely played a role in Ross Perot’s unprecedented success as a third-party candidate. In fact, he announced his campaign on Larry King’s CNN show.

Then the Internet showed up. In the 1996 race, just having a Web site was a very big deal, provided you could remember the address.

In 2004, it was all about blogs and online videos, particularly that one from the Swift-boat vets.

But this time around, the technology hasn’t really leapt so much as slipped into something a little more comfortable. As such, 2008 may be remembered, at least to me, as of the year of online candidate dating.

I’d like to take a strong stand here and say that I unequivocally will not vote for a candidate who has one of those staples of the members of Generation Text, the MySpace page. One has to have principles. But I can’t do that, otherwise I’d have no one left to vote for. Even crazy ol’ Ralph Nader has one, on which there is a startling amount of “friend comments” that include video or pictures of busty chests.

Everyone’s hip to this revolution of the Internets nowadays, and its very inclusiveness brings me to this profound thought:

Ew.

There’s something sadly desperate about those vying to lead this once-great country pandering to youngsters who rarely vote by “speaking on their level” and getting all personal.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to know that Mitt Romney is a Pisces who likes to listen to Roy Orbison and Garth Brooks. Or that the slender Mike Huckabee plays the bass guitar to unwind, when he’s not catching up on “The Sopranos” season three or reading the Holy Bible. Or that two of Leo Barack Obama’s three favorite movies are from the “Godfather” trio (found on the Spanglish MyGrito.com).

The mistake that campaigners have is that the older people who actually vote, like me, don’t want a president to hang out with and watch videos. I certainly don’t want someone like me running the country, because I know that someone like me would lose the keys to the White House, impetuously push the nuclear launch codes to hit France or Costa Rica just to see what would happen and possibly restart the Cold War with Russia. That Putin really ticks me off.

What I want is a candidate, and a president, who is smarter than me. A candidate whom I can respect; not one I want to date.

(c) 2007 Daily News; Los Angeles, Calif.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.