A few months back I wrote a post analyzing the attributes of contenders for the VP spot. The conclusion of that post was that Gen. Wesley Clark was the best pick to be Obama's VP. I mentioned at the time that I had not weighted the different metrics that were used to rank the VP contenders. Given that we know a lot more now about how the general election is going to shape up, it's time to put some weights to the different categories and see if we come up with a different result. Here is my ranking of the metrics:

1. Economic Issues (10 pts)

2. Executive Experience (9 pts)

3. Swing Staters (7 pts)

4. Brand (6 pts)

5. Foreign Policy (5 pts)

6. Women (4 pts)

7. Military Service (3 pts)

8. Hillary Supporters (2 pts)

9. Moderate / Conservative Values (1 pt)

The weights are listed in parentheses. Using the categorization that we did in the Veepstakes section for each candidate, here is the ranking of all the VP contenders (it may surprise you):

John Edwards comes out on top. Of course, if we had included negative metrics (scandal prone, bad speaker, etc.), he and others may not have done so well. Bill Richardson is no surprise, but having Bob Graham score so high was unexpected.

If the weights or the rankings of the metrics are changed, clearly, the top VP prospects will also be altered. I'm going to try and put up an interactive tool for those of you who want to play around with this, but in the mean time, if you want me to run a weighted analysis, give me your weights and rankings for the 9 metrics listed above (in the comments section) and I'll run it through our database and post the results.

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