The fine folks at Progressive Media USA have an interesting item about John McCain’s voting record in relation to the Bush White House’s wishes.
CQ’s Presidential Support studies try to determine how often a legislator votes in line with the President’s position:
CQ tries to determine what the president personally, as distinct from other administration officials, does and does not want in the way of legislative action. This is done by analyzing his messages to Congress, news conference remarks and other public statements and documents.
So, these studies only track votes when the President has an explicit, stated opinion on a bill.According to CQ, Senator John McCain has voted with President Bush 100% of the time in 2008 and 95% of the time in 2007. (emphasis in the original)
Now, CQ rating only reflects votes cast, not positions taken. It also doesn’t take into consideration votes missed, which in McCain’s case, includes most of the year. But the rating does tell us that on those rare occasions when McCain showed up for work, he voted exactly in line with Bush’s position.
What’s more, McCain’s propensity for voting in line with Bush’s priorities has gone up quite a bit in recent years. The less popular the president became with the electorate, the more popular his policy positions became with John McCain.
Progressive Media’s Jason Rosenbaum concluded, “[A] better judge of a politician’s views is not how he talks, but how he votes. John McCain – when it counted and when he showed up in the Senate to do his job in 2008 — never deviated from George Bush’s position. Not once.”
I appreciate the relative leap of logic here, and why the CQ rating may seem unfair. But I mention it in part because it reminds me of a similarly unfair rating, which we still hear quite a bit about.
The CQ score is marginally unfair in large part because McCain has been an absentee senator. He hasn’t cast a lot of votes because he’s been on the campaign trail. When McCain does show up, it’s presumably for something important to the Republican Party, on which the chamber is likely to be narrowly divided, when McCain’s vote could make a difference. Given this, it’s not especially surprising McCain would consistently side with his party and president.
As such, I could go around arguing, “John McCain has voted with George W. Bush 100% of the time.” It wouldn’t be entirely fair, and it would only be part of the story, but I could back the claim up with a non-partisan voting analysis done by a respected Washington publication.
I mention this, of course, because National Journal did an ideological test of senators and found that Barack Obama was the most liberal senator in 2007. I’ve explained over and over again why the analysis isn’t fair and is woefully incomplete. In fact, by any reasonable measure, the analysis completed by National Journal is misleading to the point of comedy. And yet, the Republican National Committee, Fox News personalities, and the media in general have treated the “most liberal senator” ranking as fair and legitimate.
If we’re playing by similar rules, then McCain has voted with Bush 100% of the time. In fact, we can also say that McCain was the Senate’s most pro-Bush member (since no one could vote with the White House’s position more than 100% of the time).
If every Republican blowhard is going to repeat the line about Obama being the “most liberal senator” between now and November, there’s no reason for Democratic blowhards to refrain from emphasizing McCain voting with Bush 100% of the time. (Indeed, the latter is actually even fairer, given that the National Journal rating is based on arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless, definitions of the word “liberal.”)
I suspect Dems won’t, however, go this route, in part because they don’t perceive the CQ rating as legitimate. Republicans won’t have similar ethical qualms.