Building the Perfect Candidate

As devotees of free minds and free markets, we spend our nights pining for a major-party politician who not only looks dreamy while reading a Teleprompter but shows some passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

President George W. Bush's determination to be all things to all people has ballooned the national debt and created an America where the worst aspects of the moralizing right, the caring left, and Wilsonian do-gooders have become national policy. To top things off, his FDA has even banned the very ephedra that might have made it possible to stay awake during Campaign 2004.

But if Bush's many failings are self-evident to libertarians, it's equally clear that the Democratic alternative (almost certainly to be John Kerry as of this writing), will in no way be worth endorsing either. The only way we're going to meet Candidate Right is to make our own—and that's just what we intend to do.

In the spirit of the do-it-yourself culture and biotechnological innovation that we celebrate regularly in these pages, we've taken the liberty of building the perfect Bush challenger from the personality traits and disparate policies offered by the various Democratic office-seekers who at one point or another have thrown their hats into the ring.