February 04, 2008
Obama most liberal? Hardly.
Normally I’m a big fan of National Journal—it’s the most thoughtful, considered, and nonpartisan news source in Washington—but I think they really blew it with their new article on Barack Obama being the “most liberal” Senator.
Each year they offer a giant, data-heavy look at the relative liberalism and conservatism of the voting records of each member of Congress, House and Senate. This year they chose to release the ratings just days before the Tsunami Tuesday primaries in what one can only imagine was an attempt to maximize their exposure. As Charlie Green, NJ's editor, said, "We thought it would be irresponsible to keep those scores under wraps during the height of the presidential primary season." Of course by releasing only two of the 100 senators' scores, NJ robs us of any real context in which to evaluate these standings. [They planned to also release McCain's, since he is still in the race, but he didn't vote often enough to 2007 to get counted. More on that in a minute.]
According to their ranking, Barack Obama has seen a thirteen-point swing towards "liberal" in his three full years in the Senate from a ranking of 82.5 (16th overall) in 2005 to 95.5 (1st overall) in 2007. Now I’d wager that this has little to do with beliefs and a lot to do with two factors: how often he’s voting and who is in the majority. His vote was much more crucial in 2007, when the Democrats held a super-slum majority in the body, than it was in 2005 or 2006 when he was in the minority.
Moreover, campaigning for President requires a lot of time not in the Senate, that’s why Bob Dole resigned from the body in 1996 when he was running. A quick glance at the Washingtonpost.com’s vote database of top vote missers and you see that, excluding the ill Tim Johnson, McCain missed the most votes, followed by fellow presidential contenders Biden and Obama.
National Journal admits that Obama didn't vote on fully one-third of their "key votes" and that McCain, who overall missed over half of the 2007 votes in the Senate, didn't vote enough often for them even to rank him.
To give a baseline here: In the 109th Congress (2005-2006), Barack Obama missed less than two percent of the votes. Hillary missed 2.5 percent and McCain missed nine percent. That's far fewer than any of them missed in 2007, meaning that the rankings from previous years are probably more representative of their actual beliefs and policy stances.
All told, Hillary Clinton scored an 82.8 (overall ranking 16th) in 2007, up from 70.2 (32nd overall) in 2006, but below her highest ranking of 88.8 (8th overall) back in 2003. She missed 17 out of the 99 NJ "key votes" and missed 23 percent of the 2007 votes in total. Obama in 2006 had an 86 (10th overall) and in his first year in Congress had a 82.5 (16th overall). Both of them saw a ten point swing from 2006 to 2007.
I imagine that Obama and Hillary only showed up last year to vote when it mattered, i.e. when they were most likely to vote with the Dems on a crucial matter. Votes where Obama's or Hillary's vote wouldn't have made a difference or where they wouldn't have needed to stand strong with the 51-seat majority probably wouldn't have necessitated a trip back from the trail. In fact, according to NJ and Washingtonpost.com, both senators missed fewer of the key votes than they did votes overall, underscoring that these were specially selected votes they attended.
And what about the actual differences between Hillary and Obama, the "key" matters that ended up making one a "moderate" Democrat in the low 80s and the other the "most liberal"? All told, they differed four times out of the 99 votes—Hillary voted with the conservatives five times in 2007 and Obama voted once. On the one time Obama voted with the conservatives, on a March measure to "express the sense of Congress that funds for U.S. troops in the field should not be cut off," Hillary did as well. On one of the five votes where Hillary voted with the conservatives, on a July 19 measure to "waive a procedural objection to providing legal immunity to people who report suspicious activities," Obama didn't even vote. So we're left with precisely three registered policy differences between Obama and Hillary that yielded National Journal's ratings. Hardly seems like a damning indictment of either one of them.
The exact same specious ranking happened to John Kerry in 2004 in National Journal's vote rankings, where he missed so many votes that they actually changed the ranking system this time to exclude candidates like McCain who were out on the trail too much. The same thing is probably true from 2004: The votes where Kerry showed up, and thus the ones where he was measured, were the ones most important to him and the Party—and thus the ones where he's most likely to vote with the Dems.
I think National Journal erred by blowing this annual ranking into a giant six-page article in the February 2nd edition. Hillary, Barack, and McCain should all be considered in the greater context of their body and their Senate colleagues, not as outliers a month before everyone else.
