My Cost of Living
My family would be rich like the Simpsons if we had my current salary eight years ago. When I was in college in the mid-nineties--bagging groceries, waiting tables and delivering pizzas--I drooled over what life would be like if I only made...about half of what I make right now. It's not that I was setting my bar low back then; it's that everything, especially the essentials, is more expensive today. Under a Clinton economy, my family would be living la vida rico with my salary; today, it barely gets us to our next paycheck.  

The Role of Government Not in My Family's Life  
My personal experience is that government agencies are infinitely less responsive and competent than they were eight years (and during the nineties). Back then, government institutions seemed more effective during budget-related shutdowns than they are fully-staffed today. Although Katrina affected me personally, it did not affect me directly, but other acts of government--facilitated by the Bush administration's total contempt for its institutions--have.  

Most critical is my son's education and the state of public schools. If not for the grace of getting him into an awesome charter school, we'd either be shelling out for an expensive private school or sending him to a public school like the one three blocks away. One like he attended before we discovered the charter school. One that does not teach arts or humanities, where gym is a once-a-week affair and the teachers give up on students when they're still in kindergarten.  

Also, unless my son earns a scholarship for college, or I figure out the local Powerball lottery, it's likely he won't enjoy the cakewalk I had paying for my tuition and fees. I worked, took grants and borrowed to pay for my college (and still barely managed financially), but it was easily doable. It was the nineties, and times were good. If I'd have had to pay for my own college nowadays, I would've never made it. I'd still be delivering pizzas in my 1991 Plymouth Sundance. This time, though, a quarter of my earnings would be poured into the gas tank.

And perhaps if John McCain and George Bush didn't think Social Security, like other government institutions, was a disgrace, my wife wouldn't need three years and a lawyer to receive disability benefits for a crippling rheumatic disease. Heck, in a Clinton economy, we wouldn't even need those benefits to pay the bills, and we probably would've never even thought to apply.  

The Role of Government in My Family's Life  
Conversely, the role of government in my family's private life is to be all up in our stuff. Rarely do we send out a package via US mail that doesn't take forever to reach its destination, and, when it does, it's a lucky day if it hasn't been ripped open, searched, mangled, and haphazardly taped back together. Probably not coincidentally, we get the same treatment at the airport. G-d only knows what kind of juicy personal stuff they're picking up in our e-mail and phone calls! Eight years ago, we would have chalked this all up to really bad luck. Today, we're pretty confident that my wife's Arabic name and former membership in Kwame Toure's movement has something to do with it.  

My Image Abroad  
Eight years ago, my American residency was a source of pride for my Israeli relatives. Today, I am the butt of their jokes. In the Nineties, my nuclear family contained the only members of our entire extended family who had migrated to America, and, in our cousins' eyes, this made us the coolest. From rap to baseball, we were on the cutting edge of hip. Nowadays, though, when they're not making cheap "fat American" jokes, they're making wisecracks about our collective stupidity. While I don't appreciate the fat jokes, I can't really blame them for knocking our common sense deficiency.  

So I gave McCain my octennial test  
And I based his score on these personal experiences and his impressive eagerness to continue the policies of the last eight years. Of course, he failed.  I suspect most other voters will likely score John McCain a solid F based on his current, albeit shifting, set of  policy positions, as well as personal experiences spanning the last 16 years that mirror my own.