The mislabeled senator

Each year, the National Journal, a non-partisan, weekly publication covering politics, policy and government, publishes an arbitrary list of the most conservative and liberal congressmen and senators.\nThis year, the list is on citation overload.\nMuch has been said and will continue to be said through the election about Sen. John Kerry's placement on the Journal's recent rankings as the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate. What no one is saying, though, is how negligently this statistic has been cited.\nThe Journal's rankings are odd. For their 2003 calculations, they ranked senators on 62 votes. Since there were over 400 Senate votes last year, mostly hot button issues were considered (among those were drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, banning so-called "partial-birth" abortions and a number of judicial nominations). \nEach vote was labeled a conservative or a liberal vote (although sometimes they were indistinguishable) and then given a weight -- from the lowest of 1 to the highest of 3. The votes are then divided into foreign policy, economic policy and social policy categories, and voila, you have your ranking.\nKerry got the short end of the stick. No one cites that Kerry missed 37 of the 62 "ranking votes" as he was preparing for his run for the presidency. In fact, Kerry couldn't even be ranked by his foreign or social policy votes because he wasn't there enough to make the cut-off.\nMake what you will about congressional truancy and missing votes -- that's a whole other debate that is worth debating. To gauge Kerry accurately though, if you're even going to consider the Journal's tiered ranking system as "accurate," Kerry's votes over the past years should be placed into context, where his "ranking percentages" are historically not far off from most of his Democratic colleagues. But that doesn't sell as well.\nYou'd imagine the Kerry campaign isn't thrilled by the fact that their whole defense must lie in the fact that (a) he missed lots of votes and (b) there's a complicated explanation of how the Journal compounds their rankings. You'd think Republicans would be salivating over these numbers -- except maybe Jim DeMint.\nRep. DeMint, R-S.C., told the Journal he was "proud" to tell his constituents he was ranked among the top six House conservatives by them in 1999 and 2001. This year, when DeMint was told his 2003 scores placed him near the center of the House GOP, he told the Journal it should revise its ratings system.\nNice flip-flop, Rep. DeMint.\nThe point is, misrepresentation is what fuels election campaigns. Rep. DeMint was obviously upset the Journal ranked him as more moderate when he believes he's more conservative. Certainly he wouldn't want to argue he has become more liberal, so it's easier to argue the system is arbitrary and full of variables from year to year (which it is). The problem is you can't argue that the system is broken for Republicans but hits the bull's-eye for Democrats.\nDon't get me wrong: To me, there's no doubt Kerry is more liberal than America as a whole, and there's no doubt President Bush is more conservative than America as a whole. You'd be quite silly to try to say otherwise, and most people don't seem bothered by it that much anyway. \nWhere there is a reasonable amount of doubt, however, is the way each campaign and the media attempts to convey the respective degrees of liberalism and conservatism to you. The Journal's list is another arbitrary addition to an already crowded campaign of twists, bends and half-truths that purport to inform citizens, but in reality, lead them astray.