http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/
Obama: Most Liberal Senator In 2007
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.
In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10. "The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter," said Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist.
But differences define campaigns. The yeas and nays matter. And in a Senate in which party-line votes are the rule, the rare exceptions help to show how two senators who seemed like ideological twins in 2007 were not actually identical. Obama and Clinton were more like fraternal policy twins, NJ's vote ratings show.
As the battles for the 2008 Democratic and Republican presidential nominations have raged, the candidates have blasted each other for taking positions that are out of line with party dogma. Obama has repeatedly challenged Clinton's 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war, labeling her foreign policy "Bush/Cheney-lite"; Clinton has pointed to Obama's "present" votes on the abortion issue in the Illinois Legislature to raise questions about his support for abortion rights. Meanwhile, Republicans have battled over the strength of their conservative credentials on taxes, immigration, and national security.
When the campaign shifts into the general election, however, the two nominees may each seek to cast their opponent as a party extremist. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for instance, Republicans attacked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as an extreme liberal, including by pointing to his ranking as the most liberal senator in NJ's 2003 vote ratings.
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