I heard a great commentary on the radio today on Public Radio’s Marketplace: A good candidate connects the dots. It’s short and quick to read, but very powerful.

Robert Reich advises voters against treating today’s hot issues as individual checkboxes, to be ticked off for each candidate in a list of pros and cons. A good president will see the connections between all of these, and will have the intelligence to understand how solutions to one problem could affect the others.

I couldn’t agree more. I think this also applies to people who are hyper-focused on a single issue, and plan to vote for a candidate because of a single policy stance. And regardless of where you stand on the issues, you have to be willing to ask yourself if the candidate you support is really going to be able to make hard decisions when a policy he promised turns out to be unachievable.