Who is the Leftist of Them All?

On May 2nd Newt Gingrich finally—finally!—curtailed his presidential campaign.  It took about twenty-three minutes to say everything he wanted to say. His nth wife, Callista, stood mutely by his side.

He refused (or delayed) endorsing Mitt Romney. Instead, he asked rhetorically whether Mitt Romney was conservative enough to earn his endorsement, then attempted an answer saying it didn’t really matter because Barack Obama was “the most radical, leftist president in American history.”



Yea, I know...adolescent humor



So much for closing ranks. Don’t expect the Romney campaign to extend an olive branch to Gingrich. One month on, there is a sense that Newt’s star has permanently dipped below the horizon.

Rick Santorum was marginally more gracious in defeat than Gingrich. On May 7th he sent a late-night email to his supporters that it was now OK to sport Romney 2012 bumper stickers.


Rick Santorum, the man who put
 the "cool" back in the sweater vest

This conjures an image of Santorum at his desk at 1:30 AM, throwing back an oversized Scotch, muttering “fuck it,” and hitting send.

But back to Gingrich’s comments regarding Obama’s politics. I have been hearing the Obama is a radical-leftist-socialist from conservative sources since the last election. Still, I wonder, in a technical sense, is Gingrich correct? Is Obama, in fact, the most liberal president in history?

Rating a politician on the liberal-conservative scale is tricky business. Numerous interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union, publish their own ratings. These groups have dog in the fight, so one may reasonably question how unbiased their ratings are.

 National Journals's 2007
 "Most Liberal" Senator of the Year

The National Journal (NJ), which enjoys a reputation for neutrality, has rated Congress since 1981. NJ’s methodology involves cherry picking the key roll-call votes during a calendar year that demonstrate political ideology (and obviously introduces its own bias in the process). It stepped into a political maelstrom during the last presidential election cycle, when it rated then-Senator Obama the most liberal senator in 2007 five days before the Super Tuesday primaries. Senator John McCain jumped on this tidbit, declaiming "It's hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left."

Closer inspection reveals a more nuanced story. Obama had missed 33 of the 99 roll-call votes NJ used in its ratings system. Meanwhile McCain had missed too many votes to be rated in 2007. Obama only voted differently than Senator Hilary Clinton twice, yet she was rated the 16th most liberal while he was the 1st most liberal, a distinction without much difference. In 2005 and 2006 NJ rated Obama, respectively, the 16th and 10th most liberal senator.

Political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal partnered in the 1980s to develop a sophisticated political mapping method which today goes by the acronym DW-NOMINATE (Dynamic Weighted Nominal Three-Step Estimation). Their methodology is not for the statistically faint-of-heart. I refer those curious for background to Keith Poole’s blog Voteview. Suffice it to say that DW-NOMINATE is today’s gold standard for rating politicians.

Using DW NOMINATE Poole and Rosenthal analyzed roll-call votes from the 1st Congress onward on a 2-dimensional scale, where the x-axis represents the traditional left-right position on economic issues, and the y-axis is the position on important regional and social issues (e.g., slavery, civil rights). Poole and Rosenthal infer the position of presidents and presidential candidates from the votes of Senators and Congressman with whom they were clearly aligned.

To get a sense of the party dynamics within the U.S. Congress, watch Voteview's video The History of American Politics in Two Minutes. Note that in the past thirty years the overlap between Republican and Democratic members of Congress has disappeared. The parties have grown further apart and more cohesive. The just-published 2012 values survey by the Pew Research Center reports the same widening gap between registered Republican and Democatic voters.


The smoothed histogram below illustrates the distribution of Senators and Congressmen along the traditional left-right economic scale in 2007. By the way the DW-NOMINATE score represents a poltician's cumulative voting record. Senators Clinton and Obama effectively fell on top of each other. Their score of -0.43 puts them slightly to the left of the typical Democrat. Senator McCain with a score of +0.33 was slightly to the left of a typical Republican. Nonetheless, in the year these three Senators ran for president, each represented the political mainstream for his/her respective party. On the other hand President George W. Bush's score of +0.76 put him on the far-right of the Republican Party.



DW-NOMINATE scores for 2007 Congress on the
 traditional liberal-conservative economic scale

 With the success of Tea Party candidates in 2010, the Republican Party has undoubtedly shifted towards Bush, which makes it all the more curious that the current Republican Party largely repudiates its last and most conservative president.


Poole and Rosenthal used the DW-NOMINATE method to score the political position of presidents from World War II forward (shown below). The remarkable observation here is that Obama's presidency so far has proved to be the least liberal of any Democratic president since and including Harry Truman. He is still liberal, but as the chief executive he has governed more moderately than he previously legislated as a senator. Meanwhile the Republican presidents starting with Eisenhower have moved steadily to the right.




DW-NOMINATE scores for presidents from 1945 to present
 (based on roll-call votes on which a president clearly articulated his position)

 There's an old saw that if you repeat something often enough, it must be true. This seems to apply to Republican claims regarding Obama's politics. As a political tactic, it has a long and disreputable history. But undoubtedly it can be effective. For historical perspective here's Lyndon Johnson's infamous "Daisy" attack ad from 1964. It was part of a concerted effort to convince voters that the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

There is considerable irony in this whole Obama-leftist-socialist thing: the Republican Party moves away from the political center, then complains that the Democratic president is too far from the political center, and, thus, not truly American. Ah, such is poilitcs. This is why we need the occasional reality check.

Whatever you think about President Obama's leadership quaities, he is clearly not the closet socialist his opponents would have us believe. He continues the moderate liberal tradition of Democratic presidents going back to Harry Truman.