I've always thought that Tufte isoverblown. I mean, sparklines - duh, its a small graph without axes. The famous "Napeleon's army" chart is really not any more enlightening or informative than just reading a paragraph or two and looking at some tables of numbers.

How do you know his policies won't be influenced by his personal opinions? Given that he claims his newsletters were written without him knowing what was in them, how do you know he won't appoint people who push a racist, bigoted political agenda and claim he "didn't know" what they were doing?

And who exactly is this tolerance-legislating straw man you put up? As if somehow we have only two choices (1) Crazy Racist Ron Paul, or (2) unnamed candidate who "legislates tolerance".

I bet Nethack still beats this.