Most Liberal?

Have you heard all the talking heads running on about how Barak Obama is "the most liberal senator in the senate?" It's really been pretty difficult to miss. Regardless of how you come down on that statement, would you have the same confidence in it if you knew that the same study group proffered the same criticism of John Kerry just prior to the last election calling Kerry the most liberal senator?

Well they did.

I have to say that in my own experience I was ready to believe, probably I did believe that Obama was being correctly labeled. However, when I heard that the same people had given the same label to Kerry my thoughts changes - maybe not all the way to ratfuckers, but certainly to shenanigans.

I got that bit listening to Counterspin. It's a great but hard to find show on NPR stations. You'd think they were a liberal source, but they are sorta like me: they hate everyone. Well, hate is probably too strong; but they are very much balanced in their observations.

They went out and got non-partisan data which says that Obama and Clinton are nearly ideologically identical and just barely to the left of center for the current group of Democratic Senators. It turns out that there are several senators further to the left than Obama. In order to come to the conclusion that he is the "most liberal" you have to cook the books. Probably if you dig deeper you will find their results are consistent with their methodology, but based on what I heard on the radio I believe you would also find the methodology was created to produce that result.

There were two other interesting tidbits on the show. Looking at McCain they discover that he almost defies an idealogical label, vacillating widely throughout the spectrum. I guess that could be interpreted in multiple ways. You could say that he has no convictions or you could say that he makes his decisions based on the facts at hand. How do you think the opposition will portray it?

The other thing they brought up was that the entire Democratic caucus is to the left of the entire Republican caucus, there is no idealogical overlap whatsoever. So we'd be best to adjust our filters such that when someone is called "a liberal republican" or "a conservative democrat" that it's really meaningless across the entire continuum - just within the group itself.

Find Counterspin and listen.