The Most Liberal Senator?

A few days ago we laughed at the news that the Dems were about to nominate the most liberal member of the Senate to lead them to crushing defeat in November. Today, in an uncharacteristic fit of something or other, we feel obliged to point out that Sen. Kerry may not be so liberal after all.

Here are links to Dr. Poole's non-parametric rankings for the 107th and 108th Senate. In each case, Senator Kerry is roughly in the middle of the Dem herd - 27th of 51, then 24th out of 48. Now, this ranking methodology does not really produce a "liberal/conservative" ranking, although Dr. Poole is evidently comfortable with the analogy; "reliably Democratic/reliably Republican" strikes me as better description. The method is objective, based on all recorded roll call votes (I quibble below), and produced by a leader in the field.

By this method, Sen. Kerry is darn close to Sen. Edwards (38th of 51, 19th of 48), but to "the right" of stalwarts such as Kennedy and Clinton. And we should note that Edwards is the less stable, over these two terms anyway, so who is the malleable, finger-in-the-wind waffler?

QUIBBLE: Any fool can ask a question that ten wise men cannot answer: Dr. Poole bases his rankings on all recorded roll call votes, including the straight party-line organizational votes - for example, all Republicans voted for Bill Frist as Leader, and for the various Republican committee chairpersons. My suspicion is that the results give a good ranking within parties (so Kerry is really a centrist Dem), but the border between Republican and Democrat on substantive votes is blurrier than these results suggest. Objectivity and simplicity might suffer, but has this been looked at?

UPDATE: Nothing like the power of an idea whose time is coming - Dan Drezner has many links on this.

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[Wombell]

Hello world