This is a bit old, but I want to address it anyway. Call it a preventative measure.
At a press conference during the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) convention in Chicago in late June, Sun-Times columnist and WTTW co-host Carol Marin asked Mayor Richard Daley the following question:
MARIN: Barack Obama, by many estimates, has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. The DLC is a moderate organization. If “change” is the byword of this election -- and just using the Supreme Court ruling on guns as one example -- who changes? Who shifts? The DLC or Barack Obama?
As far as I know, there is only one "estimate" that has labeled Obama the "most liberal" senator: National Journal's 2007 Vote Ratings. Indeed, since the rankings were released in late January, Obama's placement has been cited by media figures far and wide. But as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, those referencing the rating rarely mention the subjectivity of the National Journal rating system:
The National Journal based its rankings not on all votes cast by senators in 2007, but on "99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale." In contrast, a study by political science professors Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis, using every non-unanimous vote cast in the Senate in 2007 to determine relative ideology, placed Obama in a tie for the ranking of 10th most liberal senator. [...]
In a June 16 PolitiFact.com article analyzing the Journal ratings, St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief and PolitiFact editor Bill Adair reported that National Journal editor Charles Green "says voters shouldn't rely on a single rating to determine a candidate's ideology" and quoted Green as saying, "There's pluses and minuses to each rating system. If you look at a number of them, I think you have a pretty good picture." Additionally, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman J. Ornstein has also criticized the National Journal's rating of Obama as the "most liberal senator" in 2007, calling it "pretty ridiculous."
In short, no reporter should be citing the results of the National Journal study without noting that the methodology has been questioned.
You can watch Daley field Marin's question over at Jeff Berkowitz's place.
