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Joel indirectly calls me out. Fine, I'll bite. But I'm not going to lie to you. I'm an undecided Republican voter. Some days, I think I could settle for a Giuliani or a Romney. Other days, I wish Steve Forbes was running again. Lately, I feel like throwing up my hands and writing in Ralph Wiggum.

But what about the Democrats?

I'm picking from what's left of the field:

• Hillary Clinton

• Barack Obama

• John Edwards

• Bill Richardson

It's tough to take John Edwards seriously. His class-warfare rhetoric is divisive and destructive. So are his policy proposals. He badly misunderstands or misrepresents the tax code. His foreign policy is long on bromides, but short on substance. (Sorry, but the "war on terrorism" is much more than just a bumper-sticker slogan.) And his health care prescription is quintessentially totalitarian. So he's right out.

The contest between Obama and Clinton is a bit more challenging. Both are liberal Democrats, of course, but perhaps not as populist as Edwards and therefore not as unsavory. Clinton's views on health care are well known, Obama's less so. Or less progressively so. Despite her pandering to the party faithful on the war, Clinton drops hints that she's the most pragmatic within the Democratic field. Obama, much less so.

Clinton probably has more steel in her than Obama has. In wartime, that matters. But on domestic policy, both are just too liberal for me.

Bill Richardson appeals to me the most among the Democrats for his extensive experience in Congress, as a cabinet official and most recently as governor of New Mexico. He's pro-gun, pro-death penalty and reasonably tough on the immigration question. Unfortunately, the more I hear Richardson speak, the less sense he seems to make. His statement on the Bhutto assassination, for example, was unserious: "President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately." If only it were so simple.

But as Democrats go, Richardson's probably just conservative and just sensible enough for me -- which is probably why he's languishing at the back of the pack.