The Full Tanker Test: An update

We had a very nice response in a few venues to The Full Tanker Test, where I posed the question, if any of the current presidential candidates borrowed your lawnmower, when would it be returned and in what condidtion would it be? I was invited to discuss the question on The Ed Morrissey Show today. You can catch a full replay at the link… Mark Tapscott is the guest for the first half of the show and well worth a listen, but you can also skip ahead to the second half hour to hear our discussion of answers not only for candidates, but for media personalities and prominent bloggers as well! (I’ll warn you ahead of time that Joe Gandelman gets ranked, along with some other top tier bloggers.)

From the original link, we had some interesting and often amusing comments on this question. I appreciate them all, but one (from TMV reader and uber-commenter CStanley) deserved special merit and I’d like to reprint it here in full. What would happen if the candidates borrowed your lawnmower?

Actually the narratives would probably go like this:

McCain would be a full tanker but his wife would pay for the gas; the media would initially report about how great his lawn looked and praise him for having the guts to borrow a lawnmower from a Democrat while Republicans would say “We told him to use our lawnmower but no…he had to use theirs.” Later, when McCain becomes the GOP nominee for president, the NYT prints several articles again noting the attractiveness of his lawn but also noting that he lent the lawnmower to some lobbyists, including one attractive woman who didn’t have an affair with McCain but if readers want to get the impression that some people were concerned that he might have cut her lawn with the borrowed lawnmower, well, who are the NYT reporters to set the record straight?

Obama would give a speech attracting tens of thousands of young people and have all of them donating fistloads of cash to refill the lawnmower and volunteering to clean and return the mower, purchase one for him, and cut his lawn for him for the rest of his life.

Clinton would return the mower in disrepair and with no gas, but would convince a number of people that the Republicans broke the lawnmower and that if she hadn’t used up all the gas, they would have anyway- so why blame her?

It’s good that we can maintain our sense of humor and still comment politely on the character of the various candidates. Their individual personalities are surely a factor in our decision this fall, as well as their positions on various issues of the day. Thanks again to CStanley and everyone else who participates in answering the question and in Ed’s online television show.

UPDATE: If you don’t want to click through to Ed’s place, you can watch the show here.