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Navigation Site Search Search Copyright New Progressive Institute Inc. Pressure Points by Paul Waldman Liberal, Liberal, Liberal Just where does John Kerry rank? Not only that, John Edwards is the fourth-most liberal Senator. A day barely goes by when a Republican spinner doesn't pull this "fact" out to garnish an attack on the Democratic ticket, like a sprig of rhetorical parsley laid across a course of feigned outrage and misleading criticism.
some who use the attack themselves), it might be worthwhile to get our facts straight. As you might have heard, the ranking in question comes from the National Journal, a non-partisan magazine read widely in Washington and largely unknown outside the Beltway. Every year, the Journal selects a group of Congressional votes they think are particularly revealing of ideology, and count up where each House member and Senator voted on them. The legislators are then ranked in relative terms, each receiving a score indicating where they voted relative to the other members of their body (this is in contrast to the many liberal and conservative interest groups that give scores in absolute terms, on how often the member agrees with the group on votes important to them). When the National Journal calculated their ratings for 2003, the Republicans got a gift wrapped up in a big red bow: John Kerry came out as the most liberal Senator, while John Edwards came in at number four. But there was something funny about the 2003 numbers, particularly when it comes to these two. An Unusual Year The funny thing about 2003 related to what the National Journal does when a legislator misses votes. The Journal used 62 votes to come up with the 2003 rankings, a fairly small number relative to the hundreds of votes a Senator casts in a year. They calculate three different ratings: one for economic policy, one for social policy, and one for foreign policy. These three are then combined to come up with an overall ranking. But here's the catch: if a Senator misses more than half the votes the Journal uses in any one of these three categories, they don't count any of the votes he makes for that category, using only the remaining categories to calculate his overall score. If you're running for president, as both Kerry and Edwards were in 2003, you miss a lot of votes when you're off in coffee klatches and VFW halls in Iowa and New Hampshire. So Kerry missed 37 of the 62 votes, while Edwards missed 22. Consequently, the National Journal gave Kerry no score for economic or social policy, basing his entire ranking on his score on foreign policy. Edwards, on the other hand, got no score on foreign policy. He's pro-choice, against Bush's tax cuts, for environmental protection, and for universal health care, to name a few issues. Obviously, if you want to know how liberal or conservative a Senator is, the best thing to do is to look at their entire career. For starters, he's not the most liberal in fact, among current Senators he comes in eleventh. Here's the top fifteen, with the composite score for each Senator in parentheses: 1 Mark Dayton, D-Minn. But he was 40th in 2002, 35th in 2001, 19th in 2000, and 31st in 1999, his first year in the Senate. In the interests of providing the fullest information possible, here are the full sets of data for Kerry and Edwards. for instance, in 1985 Kerry voted more liberally than 86% of his colleagues on economic issues: John Kerry's Vote Scores Year Economic Social Foreign 1985 86 88 88 1986 94 92 75 1987 65 96 74 1988 86 86 86 1989 94 63 75 1990 92 81 83 1991 80 87 78 1992 84 84 65 1993 83 87 67 1994 72 85 72 1995 77 74 79 1996 74 92 77 1997 79 71 87 1998 83 74 86 1999 80 81 78 2000 84 66 70 2001 93 81 74 2002 95 82 73 2003 93 * * Average 839 817 771 John Edwards' Vote Scores Year Economic Social Foreign 1999 58 81 71 2000 90 66 72 2001 74 60 61 2002 66 56 62 2003 93 85 * Average 762 696 665 There's no question that Kerry is toward the liberal side of Democrats in the Senate, some years more than others and on some issues more than others. And there's equally little question that Edwards is one of the more conservative Democratic Senators again, some years and some issues more than others. it reflects the perspective politicians bring to issues we know about and those we haven't imagined yet. There will be some people who hear "John Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate" and respond, "Great!" But while wonks can debate whether Kerry is more liberal than Carl Levin or Pat Leahy, for most people the distinctions are impossible to discern. For thirty years, the National Election Studies asked Americans which party they believed was more conservative. This is about as basic a question about ideology and American politics in general as one could come up with.
For the rest and many of the 60% as well the ideas of "liberal" and "conservative" don't have much meat to them. They don't evoke specific issue positions or policy disagreements, and they have little to do with how people think about themselves. But conservatives have worked very hard to make the word "liberal" call up negative stereotypes mushy-headed, wimpy, indulgent of deviant behavior and sexual transgression, disrespectful of religious faith, and so on. Of course, a ranking by someone like the National Journal has little to do with any of these qualities; it's a collection of votes, some of which fall less than perfectly on one side of the philosophical divide between liberalism and conservatism. The Bush campaign isn't hoping that voters will take a clear look at all Kerry has done in the past and is proposing now, and conclude that they disagree with him on fundamental questions of government; in fact, they know (as does the Kerry campaign), that all but a few will do nothing of the sort. No, the intention is that if they repeat the "most liberal Senator" charge, lots of people will say to themselves, "Gee, I don't know, that Kerry is so liberal." Ask them just what that means and a scant few could tell you. But in the end, it's the impression, much more than the facts, that will make the difference.
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