John McCain. Per the National Journal's new ideological ranking of Congress members with a score of 89.7 out of 100 putting him in a tie with John Cornyn and John Barrasso. GOP I think you've found your man for 2012

And voteview has him at 28.
http://voteview.com/sen111.htm

...but National Journal is the one that rated Obama the most liberal senator and the right loved to cite them then. Oh well I've long since stopped expecting consistancy and/or integrity from CONservatives. The saddest part is when you lie to yourself when you are attempting to lie to me

I got the voteview link from Huffingtonposts story about National Journals poll. You got a problem with someone linking these two polls together, take it up with your people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/24...l?ir=Media

(02-25-2011 05:57 AM)Mr. Peanut Wrote:  John McCain. Per the National Journal's new ideological ranking of Congress members with a score of 89.7 out of 100 putting him in a tie with John Cornyn and John Barrasso. GOP I think you've found your man for 2012

The problem is with the strict, linear liberal-conservative axis itself. I dunno, maybe the baby boomers fit the rigid "pick one or the other" scheme more appropriately. But for someone who takes a more liberal position on social issues and foreign policy and a more conservative position on fiscal matters, these rankings mean very little.

(02-25-2011 07:44 AM)Mr. Peanut Wrote:  ...but National Journal is the one that rated Obama the most liberal senator and the right loved to cite them then.

And the left loves being considered liberal, so what's the problem? Oh well, I've long since stopped expecting any intelligence from liberals. Just snarky insults because they think cognitive dissonance is the same thing as "integrity."

(02-25-2011 08:25 AM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  

(02-25-2011 05:57 AM)Mr. Peanut Wrote:  John McCain. Per the National Journal's new ideological ranking of Congress members with a score of 89.7 out of 100 putting him in a tie with John Cornyn and John Barrasso. GOP I think you've found your man for 2012

The problem is with the strict, linear liberal-conservative axis itself. I dunno, maybe the baby boomers fit the rigid "pick one or the other" scheme more appropriately. But for someone who takes a more liberal position on social issues and foreign policy and a more conservative position on fiscal matters, these rankings mean very little.

They mean nothing at all. They meant nothing when both Kerry and Obama were ranked as most liberal during their respective presidential bids however it still gets run up the flagpole on this board. The right just bought into National Journal's stats then

Suppose we go instead with VoteView, which HuffPost describes as having a "more sophisticated statistical model." They list Coburn as most conservative senator, which makes more sense. Going to the 109th Congress, they rank Obama as 15th most liberal senator, and the 11-20 rankings are Clinton, Durbin, Leahy, Mikulski, Obama, Kerry, Harkin, Schumer, Murray, Dodd.

Seems to me that number 15 on that list is hardly close to the mainstream of American political thought. And I think that is the point about Obama, he is clearly outside the center.

If we defined the center as positions 45-55, for the 109th Congress you get Ben Nelson, Chaffee, Specter, Snowe, Collins, Coleman, Smith (OR), Stevens, Murkowski, Voinovich, Warner. For the 111th, there are 107 listed because of mid-term changes, so move the center to 49-59 and you get Johnson, Bennet, Hagan, Warner, Baucus, Liebermann, Pryor, Landrieu, Webb, McKaskill, Manchin. Either list strikes me as much more representative of the mainstream of American political thought than Obama.

You may quibble over this list or that, or over slight differences between lists, but there's a pretty clear trend. Obama is nowhere near the center.

What I don't understand is why the lefties keep trying to maintain that he is. If he were truly in the center, you lefties would hate him. You like him, so he must not be anywhere near the center. If Obama's not a socialist, why do the socialists love him?

That's the whole point of the thread. It's laughable that McCain would be rated most conservative and it was laughable when the same publication rated Obama and Kerry before him as the most liberal. The reason people on the left say the president is a moderate is because he is nowhere near the them on the left.

(02-25-2011 08:59 PM)Mr. Peanut Wrote:  The reason people on the left say the president is a moderate is because he is nowhere near them on the left.

When Obama was a member of the Illinois Senate and the United States Senate, was there any issue on which he did not take the "left" position? If yes, which one(s)?
And I would ask the same basic question for Kerry. He has been a member of the Senate since 1985. Out of all the thousands (tens of thousands?) of roll-call votes he has taken, I am curious to know on which ones (if any) did he vote with the majority of Republicans against the majority of Democrats?


I have always taken the National Journal ratings seriously and I still do. No, they are not the Gospel, but generally they give a fair, overall sense of the lay of the land. No one can seriously and honestly claim that National Journal, or its legislative ratings, are editorially motivated to make Democrats (as a party) or Republicans (as a party) look bad. It's a thoroughly non-partisan publication.

I haven't paid attention to McCain's voting record lately, but based on his bitterness over the '08 election, and his need to beat back a right-wing primary challenge back home, it is at least plausible on its face that he would have voted a very conservative line in '09 and '10. People forget now, but his old voting record in the 1980s was deeply conservative.

McCain has always been a fiscal conservative, certainly more than Shrub. Where he was considered moderate was the social issues. The problem was that he had to abandon moderate positions on some social issues to get the republican nomination. IMO that made him a far less attractive candidate in the 2008 general election. That is a structural issue that the republican party has to address in some fashion, because if what you have to do to get their nomination makes you unelectable in the fall, we are doomed to a succession of Obamas.

Given his feint to the right on social issues in 2008, his need to move further to the right on immigration issues to cover his butt at home, the composition of the legislative slate in 2009-10, and the fact that the republican establishment has pretty much moved away from fiscal conservatism, I'm not at all certain that the 2009-10 version of John McCain isn't close to being legitimately the most conservative member of the senate. I have a hard time thinking of him as more conservative than Coburn or DeMint, but that's about it.

(02-26-2011 02:32 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  McCain has always been a fiscal conservative, certainly more than Shrub.

In fairness to Shrub, the main thrust of his 2000 campaign identified him as a "compassionate conservative" (a "Great Society conservative", as I called him), not a "fiscal conservative." Don't have to like it or approve of it, just don't say we weren't warned.

Quote:The problem was that [McCain] had to abandon moderate positions on some social issues to get the republican nomination.

Like what?

Quote:IMO that made him a far less attractive candidate in the 2008 general election.

Do you believe McCain's loss was attributable, in any significant degree, to his position on "social issues"?

Quote:if what you have to do to get their nomination makes you unelectable in the fall, we are doomed to a succession of Obamas.

That is logically unassailable. If "x" is not "y", then "y" is not "x". But I wonder, what (if anything) is it that a Republican has to do to get their nomination that renders them unelectable in the fall? Did this dynamic hold true in the 2010 elections? Previous elections?

The best and most effective campaign against McCain was portraying him as four more years of Shrub. McCain made it worse by kowtowing to the religious right to get the nomination. I don't know that his pandering was all social conservatism, but that was certainly a big part of the "McBush/McSame" image.

I still think he might have won had he opposed TARP. That was when he ceased to be a fiscal conservative to follow Shrub. And to those who keep posting about how well TARP is working because we are getting some of the money paid back, I say this--the purpose of TARP was supposed to be to get the banks lending again; it's coming up on three years, are banks lending again?

As for 2010, there was certainly a religious right aspect to a couple of senate candidates whose primary wins arguably cost the republicans the opportunity to capture a couple of very vulnerable democrat seats.

I think the republicans are going to have to repudiate Shrub openly at some point. IMO McCain would have been a stronger presidential candidate had he done so.

In 2000, Shrub promised to reduce the size of the federal government and get us out of the nation-building business. How did that work out?

(02-26-2011 03:40 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  The best and most effective campaign against McCain was portraying him as four more years of Shrub

True; but the Republicans could have nominated John Kerry and he would have been attacked the same way.

Quote:McCain made it worse by kowtowing to the religious right to get the nomination.

McCain essentially refused to even meet with Dobson for several months, and then finally agreed to meet him at the airport in Denver or some other neutral location. Dobson insisted McCain come to his office in Colo. Springs; McCain told him -- nicely, I'm sure -- to go to hell, and the meeting never occurred.

Quote:I still think he might have won had he opposed TARP. That was when he ceased to be a fiscal conservative to follow Shrub.

I absolutely agree. I remember the exact moment I knew McCain had blown it: was when he announced he was "suspending" his campaign in order to go to Washington and "do something", which turned out to be TARP. Game, set, match: Obama. McCain might have lost anyway, but it sure would have been a whole lot closer.

Quote:As for 2010, there was certainly a religious right aspect to a couple of senate candidates whose primary wins arguably cost the republicans the opportunity to capture a couple of very vulnerable democrat seats.

I agree that if the GOP picks someone like Christine O'Donnell or Sharron Angle, Obama is in like Flynn. That seems unlikely to me. With the sole exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964 (a painful campaign for Republicans), the GOP has never "gone rogue" with its presidential nomination, and I don't expect it will in 2012, either. (There is one ominous possibility in that regard, but for now I don't thnk it will happen.)

Quote:In 2000, Shrub promised to reduce the size of the federal government and get us out of the nation-building business. How did that work out?

Shrub let me down in many ways, but I have to say that 9/11 was a legitimate basis for abandoning some of his earlier priorities. As someone said to me at the time, "As soon as the budget-deficit highjacks some airplanes and crashes them into high-rise office buildings, I'll start worrying about it as much as I do this" (where "this" = anti-US terrorism and its various state-sponsors). I didn't fully agree with him, but I could see his point.