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.

The Age of Foolishness

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...  --opening line of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

As I commence what I hope is an enduring journal about politics, policy, and the consequences thereof, my mind conjures Charles Dickens’s oft-quoted quote about it being the best of times and the worst of times…seems like most of us think it's the worst of times.

In the summer of 2010 just about every adult in America is looking for someone to blame. Usually that someone is affiliated with governance. Political ads are starting to clog the airways. We are only a few months from the mid-term elections when America invariably tells the new president that it’s not having as much fun as when the two were dating.

President Obama's Inauguration January 21, 2009

No sooner had one and a half million people gathered on the National Mall to welcome President Obama then an ostensibly anti-tax, hardcore libertarian movement emerged under the moniker The Tea Party in opposition to everything on the new president’s agenda (apparently it’s highly inappropriate to call them “Teabaggers.”)

Self-Explanatory

Symbolically the last combat troops just departed Iraq, leaving a still politically divided country and 50,000 non-combat (by definition) U.S. troops. Despite regular suicide bombings and their attendant casualties, there seems a glimmer of hope that Iraq will gradually get its act together. Mission accomplished—sort of.

The same optimism doesn’t apply to Afghanistan, where eight years after we defeated the Taliban on the battlefield, we face a reinvigorated insurgent enemy. At home we grow unsure about the best path to follow. I, for one, can’t fathom why any Afghan would wish to dwell in a land that resembles the 15th century with cell phones.

Both wars speak to the feud between Islam and modernity, with the United States and Europe the representatives of modernity. In New York City we debate the moral propriety of building an Islamic mosque/community center two blocks from Ground Zero. Who is financing a mosque on prime Wall Street real estate? And are we talking north-south or east-west blocks—there’s a difference?

About Iran…what can I say, President Ahmadinejad (pronounced afterdinnerjacket) would be a joke, but, you know, he, the mullahs, and their Brownshirt minions actually torture and kill people and verge on acquiring nuclear weapons. Somehow this sucks all the humor out of it.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards--I get teary-eyed when I see a good goosestep

South of our border is a de facto war between organized crime and the Mexican State. The death toll of 22,700 over 3+ years suggests that it is more real war, similar to the insurgent conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan, than police action. Today I read in the back pages of the Wall Street Journal that Mexican marines discovered 72 murdered migrants on a ranch in the state of Tamaulipas. No, that’s not a typo—seventy-two. Apparently it is the handiwork of the Zetas, the most thuggish of the Mexican gangs. It is particularly troubling (to me anyways) that these criminal enterprises are able to break down the institutions that create and maintain civilized society in Ciadad Juarez and the other border towns that control the flow of drugs into the U.S.

In the Gulf of Mexico a hole in the ocean floor spewed oil for 3 months. The corporate entities involved—BP, Transocean, Halliburton (hey, say hello to Dick Cheney for me), et. al.—demonstrated collective incompetence both on the day the rig exploded and for weeks thereafter. The only positive is America now appreciates (or should) the technical difficulties and risks inherent in deep-sea drilling. Predictably the industry opposes a modest 6-month drilling moratorium while we figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Fire

Expect to hear the same thing from the Iowa industrial egg farms that recently recalled 500,000,000 salmonella-laden eggs.

A gay federal judge overturned Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in California. By most accounts the initial legal defense of the act was pathetic. Stand by for the fireworks as this case moves toward the Supreme Court.

Elin--Yea, I don't understand either

Another omen…Tiger Woods finished 78th or thereabouts at Firestone Country Club earlier this month. Now he and Elin are officially divorced. Maybe Tiger can get back to having regular sex and see if it helps his golf stroke.

Which brings us to the Big Enchilada—the great financial crisis of 2008, or was it 2009, well 2010 ain’t turning out so hot…who knows exactly when it will end. With the passage of time we’ll come up with an appropriate name for it. I like My Big Fat American Recession. Suffice it to say, it’s fueling most of our political discontent.

This, in a nutshell, is our age. Arrogance, avarice, ignorance, incompetence, mischief, and plain old-fashioned evil dominate the headlines. Is it the worst of times? Certainly not. As Dickens suggested we rarely see our own times clearly—we want to speak in superlatives.

Behind the scenes there is evidence that the grown-ups among us, some of whom are politicians, are cleaning up our mess and putting the house in order. My goal with this blog is to promote the kind of civil discourse that helps people arrive at consensus behind policies that really promote the public good.

Let’s see if it works.