15-04-2008, 08:01 PM
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#883 (permalink)
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Last Online: Today 05:25 PM Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: deleting posts in issues
Posts: 6,674
| again, nice try. Quote:
a bit of context here: National Journal used 99 Senate votes in 2007 as the basis for its rankings, and because he was on the presidential campaign trail, Obama missed a third of those votes. (According to the magazine, Obama voted the liberal way 65 out of 66 votes. Clinton, meanwhile, voted the liberal way in 77 out of her 82 votes).
National Journal's vote ratings became an issue in the 2004 general election, when Republicans used the magazine's ranking of John Kerry as the most liberal senator of 2003 to label the then-Democratic nominee as the "most liberal senator" -- even though that was his rating for just that one year, when (like Obama did) he missed quite a few Senate votes due to being on the presidential campaign trail.
As National Journal's editor wrote back then, "[O]ur magazine -- or, more precisely, our annual congressional vote ratings edition -- has become a Republican talking point in the 2004 presidential campaign. And that's been a fascinating, and disconcerting, experience. Fascinating because we're more used to being cited in congressional hearings than on the Today show. Disconcerting because the shorthand used to describe our ratings of Kerry and Edwards is sometimes misleading -- or just plain wrong."
| Is Obama the most liberal senator? - First Read - msnbc.com |
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