How oily is your candidate

We find that politicians in general are an oily lot. Indeed the vast majority of national politicians have significant funding from the oil industry.

An cool new online application by OilChange International takes this data and forms a pleasant graphical representation to help citizens view exactly how much money their favorite and (most loathed) presidential candidates have received from oil lobbies.

OilChange has been hard at work providing an interface that’s easy to understand on a glance, but also contains links to detailed data. Users can click on each oil company to see how much money they gave to whom, in dollar figures. Candidates can also be clicked on for a detailed list of how much money they received from whom.

So you’re probably itching to know who the oiliest of the 2008 candidates is. The oiliest is (or should we say was) Rudolph Guiliani who received $550,608 from oil companies. Most of this came from Stewart and Stevenson. Close behind is former front-runner Mitt Romney, who received $336,783 in contributions. McCain is fourth among candidates, while Huckabee is last, behind even the Democrats.

Hillary Clinton is top among the democrats, with $223,350. Love Clinton? Well, maybe you can take minor comfort in the fact that despite coming in a healthy sixth with $106,112, current democratic front-runner Barack Obama received Exxon's top contribution ($15,150).

While the graph is timely and useful, after a while you might get bored. OilChange calculated this and in their eagerness to keep you pleased has thus also provided similar graphs for the 2000 and 2004 elections -- just in case you didn’t realize how oily President Bush really was.

Will the graph help to weaken oil lobbyists’ sway over presidential candidates? Perhaps, but it may only serve to show that we have a very oily president now and will have a new -- but only slightly less oily -- president in 2008.

Cross Posted from EnviroWonk