More on National Journal rankings

I’m not the first writer to notice the odd coincidence of the National Journal deciding that John Kerry and Barack Obama were the most liberal members of the Senate in 2004 and 2008, respectively.

Steve Benen wrote this when the rankings were first released:

Taking a closer look at this year’s results, Obama and Joe Biden were both considered more liberal than Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders. This, alone, should make one wonder about the reliability of the rankings.

Better yet, National Journal’s press release on the rankings noted the criteria was based on 99 key roll-call votes last year: “Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 votes in which he participated, while Clinton voted the liberal position on 77 of 82 votes.” So, Clinton voted for the liberal position 77 times, Obama voted for it 65 times, which makes Obama the chamber’s single most liberal member. Got it.

What’s more, Obama was the 16th most liberal senator in 2005, and the 10th most liberal in 2006, before racing to the front of the pack in 2007. National Journal suggests this has something to do with Obama moving to the left to curry favor with Democratic primary voters.

But there’s a more logical explanation: Obama missed a whole lot of votes in 2007 — he’s been on the campaign trail — but was on the floor for many of the biggest, most consequential votes. In nearly every instance, he voted with the party. And with that, voila! The most liberal senator in America.

Except that’s not much of a standard. The rankings use an amorphous meaning of the word “liberal,” and the percentage doesn’t take missed votes into account at all (which also helps explain why Kerry nabbed the top spot four years ago)

But none of that is going to matter for the rest of the campaign. The Republican National Committee has already issued a statement and, one assumes, every far-right outlet in the country will soon do the same.

Brian Beutler writes:

I think progressive commentators everywhere really ought to avoid burning a lot of pixels ruminating about who this helps and hurts electorally, and instead should call bullshit on the rankings themselves.

On almost any of the major votes that Obama missed, you'll find that men like Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders were usually on hand, making phone calls, rallying their colleagues, and voting the right way. More to the point, those men advocate from the floor for progressive positions, with passion, every week while Barack Obama does not. Yes, passion is hard to gauge. But instead of trying (by, say, logging hours spent speaking at hearings, from the chamber, etc., and assigning those a value to be paired with voting records) National Journal relies instead on a weird system by which a senator who takes the "liberal" position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50. …

All of which is to say that this is philistinism masquerading as social science--it's the U.S. News College Guide of Washington politics. Journalists ought to understand that. And those of conscience ought to ignore it, or lay it bare, but certainly not feed into it.

I agree with both writers that the rankings are essentially bogus—they are not a reliable guide to a Senator’s legislative work. I would go a little further, though. It’s simply too perfect that John Kerry and Barack Obama were both the most liberal members of the Senate the year before each ran for president.

The explanation that both Kerry and Obama missed a lot of votes, making them seem more liberal by the National Journal’s criteria, does not gibe with the fact that several Senators made serious campaigns for the nomination in both cycles. John Edwards missed no votes in 2003? Chris Dodd didn’t miss as many votes as Obama in 2007, even though he moved his family to Iowa to campaign for the state's caucuses? What about Clinton? She wasn’t as busy campaigning as was Obama?

It's worth questioning when a supposedly disinterested magazine, marketed to government professionals, literally produces for the Republican Party one of their best talking points in two consecutive elections.

—Douglas Carlucci