Rating Party Platforms

Ranking high in the well-done-quixotic-endeavors category, Brandon of Siris rates the GOP, Democratic, Libertarian and Green party platforms on all aspects other than politics, offering categories for judging including: Preliminaries, Preamble, Organization, Internet Accessibility and General Informativeness. Not being a partisan hack like me, Brandon is well suited to this task and pulls it off with aplomb. I was desperately tempted to post his conclusion and award for best platform, but really, in all fairness, you need to click through in order to get that.

...We also see the usual difference between Republican and Democratic party platforms, regardless of which party is in power: the Republicans tell us how great they are, and the Democrats tell us how bad the Republicans are. This joint effort to insist that every election is all about the Republican Party is one of the clear proofs that bipartisan cooperation is not dead in this country.
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And here we see the real dividing lines between the parties: does the platform have a statement of principles or values? Libertarians have principles, but no values. Greens have values, but no principles. Democrats and Republicans have neither principles nor values. This is a step back for the Republicans, who in previous platforms would list values, even though they were somewhat random and had nothing to do with anything else in the platform.
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The Republicans have the best cover sheet for the PDF version, but it was not a heavily competitive year for cover sheets -- the PDF for the Democrats has no cover sheet at all, the Greens have no easily accessible PDF, and the Libertarians, while jazzing things up with a little blue and gold, can't really compete. The Republican cover sheet is, however, very, very red.