Obama named "Most liberal senator"

By Rick Moran

For a guy who touts himself as a uniter and not a divider, Barack Obama sure doesn't vote that way in the United States Senate.

In fact, according to the National Journal's annual rankings, Obama is the most partisan, most liberal member of the Democratic caucus:

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.

So much for the "Agent of Change." Obama has demonstrated again and again that there is a troubling gap between his soothing rhetoric about bi-partisanship and unity and his actions and deeds. One begins to wonder if the media will ever knock the stars out of their eyes long enough to examine this phenomena and expose Obama for the Democratic partisan he truly is.

Don't hold your breath though. If the media were to give the lie to Obama's rhetoric, they would destroy the most compelling part of their campaign narrative - Obama as savior, riding in on a white horse to redeem America from all the sins of the Bush Administration. So unless the candidate slips up (or more revelations surface about some of his more problematic relationships with crooked financiers like Rezko or black seperatists like the pastor of the church he attends) we are likely to be treated to glowing coverage of the candidate until the end.

HT: Rich Baehr