closetpuritan (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} closetpuritan) wrote,@ 2008-02-17 20:49:00 |
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McCain is a liar, and the National Journal probably is, too
McCain has a reputation for integrity and straight talk, but he's still a politician, and like others of his kind, he's not above distortions and lies. Here's an example that I personally found. It's not especially egregious, but the quote touches on another subject I'd like to discuss: the National Journal and its vote ratings.
“It’s not an accident that [Obama] has, I think, according to National Journal, the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate,” [McCain] said. “I have one of the most conservative.”
That second sentence is a lie. A lot of hardcore conservatives feel that John McCain is not conservative enough, and most people would agree that there are clearly other people in the Senate much more conservative than McCain--but these are matters of opinion and could be debated. What is not a matter of opinion is that, according to the very article that McCain just agreed was accurate about Obama as a standard, McCain's voting record is nowhere near the most conservative in the Senate:
You can also see here that although McCain's lifetime conservative rating is 71, it's been steadily declining, and in the last few years his overall conservative rating (not just his rating on social issues) has been around 59. (The liberal/conservative rating in any given year is based on comparing the senator's voting record on 99 "key votes" to those of other senators. A conservative rating of 59 means that McCain is more conservative than 59% of other senators.) Given that that rating includes Democrats as well as Republicans, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that his record is one of the most conservative.
In any case, though, I don't trust the rankings done by the National Journal. This is the second presidential election in a row that they've named a likely Democratic presidential nominee as the "most liberal" senator*. The liberal/conservative scores are based on "key votes", and they could select which votes are "key" in such a way as to manipulate scores--for example, they could eliminate otherwise-suitable votes from the list of "key" votes if Obama voted conservatively. In fact, nowhere in the original article do they disclose which votes were chosen as "key". For all I know, the numbers could be completely made up. But I suspect they would have gone the more subtle route of eliminating from consideration almost all the votes that Obama voted conservatively on--leaving in one conservative vote, "a Republican-sponsored resolution expressing the sense of Congress that funding should not be cut off for U.S. troops in harm's way", to make their strategy less obvious while still preserving the "most liberal" rank for Obama.
*I'm not too impressed by the fact that McCain missed more than half the votes in two of the National Journal's three categories--but if their methods for choosing "key votes" are as questionable as I suspect, this might not be as bad as it seems to be at first glance.
**In their defense, National Journal does seem to concede that its assessment of John Kerry as the "most liberal" senator was inaccurate: "Members who missed more than half of the votes in any of the three issue categories did not receive a composite score in NJ's ratings. (This rule was imposed after Kerry was ranked the most liberal senator in our 2003 ratings despite having missed more than half of the votes in two categories.)"
McCain has a reputation for integrity and straight talk, but he's still a politician, and like others of his kind, he's not above distortions and lies. Here's an example that I personally found. It's not especially egregious, but the quote touches on another subject I'd like to discuss: the National Journal and its vote ratings.
“It’s not an accident that [Obama] has, I think, according to National Journal, the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate,” [McCain] said. “I have one of the most conservative.”
That second sentence is a lie. A lot of hardcore conservatives feel that John McCain is not conservative enough, and most people would agree that there are clearly other people in the Senate much more conservative than McCain--but these are matters of opinion and could be debated. What is not a matter of opinion is that, according to the very article that McCain just agreed was accurate about Obama as a standard, McCain's voting record is nowhere near the most conservative in the Senate:
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. ... did not vote frequently enough in 2007 to draw a composite score.* He missed more than half of the votes in both the economic and foreign-policy categories. On social issues, which include immigration, McCain received a conservative score of 59.
You can also see here that although McCain's lifetime conservative rating is 71, it's been steadily declining, and in the last few years his overall conservative rating (not just his rating on social issues) has been around 59. (The liberal/conservative rating in any given year is based on comparing the senator's voting record on 99 "key votes" to those of other senators. A conservative rating of 59 means that McCain is more conservative than 59% of other senators.) Given that that rating includes Democrats as well as Republicans, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that his record is one of the most conservative.
In any case, though, I don't trust the rankings done by the National Journal. This is the second presidential election in a row that they've named a likely Democratic presidential nominee as the "most liberal" senator*. The liberal/conservative scores are based on "key votes", and they could select which votes are "key" in such a way as to manipulate scores--for example, they could eliminate otherwise-suitable votes from the list of "key" votes if Obama voted conservatively. In fact, nowhere in the original article do they disclose which votes were chosen as "key". For all I know, the numbers could be completely made up. But I suspect they would have gone the more subtle route of eliminating from consideration almost all the votes that Obama voted conservatively on--leaving in one conservative vote, "a Republican-sponsored resolution expressing the sense of Congress that funding should not be cut off for U.S. troops in harm's way", to make their strategy less obvious while still preserving the "most liberal" rank for Obama.
*I'm not too impressed by the fact that McCain missed more than half the votes in two of the National Journal's three categories--but if their methods for choosing "key votes" are as questionable as I suspect, this might not be as bad as it seems to be at first glance.
**In their defense, National Journal does seem to concede that its assessment of John Kerry as the "most liberal" senator was inaccurate: "Members who missed more than half of the votes in any of the three issue categories did not receive a composite score in NJ's ratings. (This rule was imposed after Kerry was ranked the most liberal senator in our 2003 ratings despite having missed more than half of the votes in two categories.)"
