People who think about these things recognize that senators just don’t become president. The last two sitting senators were Warren Harding (1921) and JFK (1961). Maybe it’s the perceived lack of experience, or maybe it’s the easy access to voting records as fodder for attack ads. For whatever reason, senators don’t become president.

Oh, and neither do representatives; James Garfield (1881) is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president.

Who does? Governors and vice presidents.

So let’s look at the current crop of candidates. (Well, viable ones. The whole list is pretty long.)

On the Dems’ side:

Biden — sitting senator
Clinton — sitting senator
Dodd — sitting senator
Edwards — lawyer (former senator)
Gravel — lecturer
Kucinich — sitting representative
Obama — sitting senator
Richardson — governor (N.M.)

On the Repubs’ side:

Giuliani — lawyer (former mayor)
Huckabee — minister (former governor)
Hunter — sitting representative
Keyes — author
McCain — sitting senator
Paul — sitting representative
Romney — businessman (former governor)
Tancredo — sitting representative
Thompson — actor (former senator)

Which means that, if you’re concerned about the party winning more than the particular candidate, Bill Richardson is your best bet on the Democratic ticket, followed by Edwards and Gravel. On the GOP ticket, Romney is your best bet, followed by Giuliani, Thomson, Huckabee and Keyes.

This is good news for the GOP because there are more non-senators and -representatives on its side. On the other hand, if Richardson gets the Democrat’s nod, history hints he can beat anyone on the Repub ticket.

Thanks to a point-to by Gnomic to one of those choose-the-candidate quizzes, I took the two minutes to fill it out. It spat back the list of candidates ordered by intelligence.

The results are here.

Bottom line: Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd seem to be the smartest of the pack, while Fred Thompson and Tom Tancredo show themselves to be idiots.

My politics used to be middle of the road, but with America having become more polarized than ever thanks to Mr. Uniter-not-Divider, the candidates ended up sorted by party lines.

This isn’t entirely a surprise. The Repubs apparently have only two tools in their toolbox, thus their solution for everything boils down to A) use violence or the threat of it, or B) give tax money to a private corporation to deal with it. (Or C: ignore it.)

I’m smarter and more flexible than that.

Oh, and as for Iraq, I chose “Draw down the U.S. troops and decentralize Iraq by dividing it into regions of separate governments.” Apparently that’s not in anyone’s playbook.

“Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” — Rudy Giuliani, 1994