by Frank James
It was somewhat surprising that Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama weren’t asked at last night’s Los Angeles debate about the National Journal ratings that came out yesterday which concluded that Obama was the Senate’s most liberal member in 2007 and that Clinton was the sixteenth most liberal.
The closest the debate veered to the whole “liberal” issue was when Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus asked the candidates how they would fend off Republican charges sure to come in the general election that they’re garden-variety tax and spend Democrats. The context was that both the Clinton and Obama health-care plans would require tax increases to pay for them.
Nevertheless, calling a Democrat a tax-and-spend liberal and saying he or she is the most liberal member of the Senate are two entirely different things, especially in a Senate containing Sen. Edward Kennedy, who earlier this week endorsed Obama.
If Obama eventually wins the nomination, it’s easy to imagine that comparison being made in Republican ads by some narrator with a baritone voice striking an ominous tone. “Did you know that an important, non-partisan news publication said Obama was more liberal than Ted Kennedy?” Liberal has become such an epithet in American politics that Republicans will be place it in heavy rotation. It is so radioactive that the candidates last night didn’t apply the word liberal to themselves and between them only uttered the word once when Clinton used it in an aside.
The risk for Obama is significant, especially if Sen. John McCain turns out to be the Republican nominee.
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McCain still appeals to many independents and some Democrats because he’s not viewed as a doctrinaire conservative. He has shown a willingness to break with his party, on immigration and on campaign-finance reform, for instance.
While McCain didn’t vote enough in 2007 to be scored by National Journal, his 2006 score was 56.8. His lifetime conservative score is more like 71.8.
This suggests it would be theoretically easier for him to move to the center because he would have viewer votes to disown than it would be Obama whose 2007 liberal score was 95.5.
Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton’s 2007 liberal score was 82.8 which would seem to make it easier for her than Obama to move to the middle.
Actually. there really isn’t much difference between Clinton and Obama when it comes to their voting records. That’s a point the Clinton campaign makes all the time when it comes to the two Democrats’ post-invasion positions on Iraq.
If you look at the list of 99 Senate votes the National Journal weighed to get its rankings, Obama and Clinton only voted differently on two votes(Obama missed 33 votes while Clinton missed 17. National Journal said adjustments were made to keep missed roll call votes from skewing the results.)
So there’s probably less distance between number one and number 16 than would seem true just based on their relative rankings.
The National Journal data do indicate an increasingly liberal movement since 2005 on the parts of Clinton and Obama as they got closer to Democratic primaries, which makes sense given the need to appeal to party activists.