Obama was the 41st most liberal senator in 2007

Great Debates
1

So says this chart, anyway. The ratings given to each senator by seven progressive or progressive-leaning groups (the ACLU, the SEIU, NARAL) were taken and aggregated, and the senators were ranked by mean percentage. Hillary, by the way, comes out as the 37th most liberal senator. (Most liberal was a tie between Feingold, Cardin, Menendez, and Reed.)

Anyone want to debate the relative merits of this ranking system versus the National Journal ratings that famously called Obama the most liberal person in the Senate?

2

The NJ rankings seem to look more at Senators’ poll numbers than their voting records – recall that in 2004, they ranked John Kerry the most liberal Senator. Not coincidentally, he was also the leading candidate for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination.

3

I’m not too familiar with the NJ – does it have a reputation for political bias?

4

One point: He has an N/A from the NAACP. Assuming he’d get a 100 (most Dems do), he’d jump up just ahead of Hillary. But then Hillary has an N/A, too, so maybe she’d jump up to a higher slot, too.

I’d also have to see how these guys rated the Senators. Some of the scores for the Democrats are surprisingly low, so maybe the didn’t vote on one pet project for the group or something like that.

5

Both methodologies are pretty stupid, IMHO. The NJ methodology relied on fairly arbitrary decisions about what legislation was liberal. So ethics and homeland security became liberal issues, according to NJ.

Relying on interest group ratings seems pretty poor to me as well. Reducing liberalism to those seven groups is extremely reductionist. I’m confident that I could pick seven other left-leaning groups and get entirely different results. Why SEIU and not AFL-CIO? Why LCV and not NRDC? And why all equal? By their data, NARAL is clearly more correlative to being a progressive than the ACLU. Why not weight the NARAL score more highly?

And, my guess is that if you broke down the systems the NGO’s use, you’d find that those votes are not all partisan (unless you assume that belief in climate change is partisan, etc.)

6

Whatever happened to ADP/ACU rankings? I always felt these were useful - they were assessments by openly conservative and liberal groups based on selected votes.

They’re still around, but apart from some opinion pieces I seldom see them mentioned.