Note: Matt Stoller was man enough (unlike George W. Bush) to admit that he had made a mistake, and he updated his post. So I've taken out everything about Rove-style tactics and criticisms of Matt. I'm leaving the title just because people will notice it.
Who here watched the Presidential debates last year (hopefully everybody)?
In the second debate, the President said the following:
First, the National Journal named Senator Kennedy(sic) the most liberal senator of all. And that's saying something in that bunch. You might say that took a lot of hard work.
He meant to say Senator Kerry, of course-Kerry missed a lot of votes for obvious reasons and only showed up for close votes (on which nearly every Democrat voted the "liberal" position), his record was more liberal than it would have been if he'd shown up for every vote.
So what does this have to do with Matt Stoller of mydd.com?
Note: Please read carefully at least up to "Matt," before posting.
Simple. He accidentally did something similar in a recent post attacking the League of Conservation Voter's endorsement of Senator Lieberman (not a pro-Lieberman diary, just a pro-truth diary, which happens to favor Lieberman in this case [unlike on foreign policy issues, some economic issues, and the issue of how he maligns his party on TV]).
Unlike the National Journal (which doesn't including missed votes when calculating the rating for a member of Congress), many organizations which advocate for particular issues, such as the League of Conservation Voters count missed votes the same as votes against the organization's position. So Matt decides to use this to attack the LCV's endorsement of Senator Lieberman. It turns out Matt did this because he was so excited about finding another way to make Lieberman look bad [not that there aren't plenty of valid ways to do so] that he didn't notice that John Kerry and John Edwards also both had ratings well below every other Democrat in 2003. Evidence for this (oddly enough, it also backed up the other possibility) is that he also took Lieberman's overall rating for the 109th Congress(56%) (and accidentally labeled it as his 2004 rating), which was much lower than his 2004 rating (100%) due to their being far more votes rated in 2003 than in 2004, and the fact that the League of Conservation Voters calculates the overall 109th Congress rating as the total number of "good" votes over the total number of votes rather than as the average of the ratings for the first and second sessions.
So here's what I posted at mydd.com (under bobdoleisevil, which is what I registered as back in 2004 or early 2005, and haven't gotten changed).
Matt,
The reason Joe Lieberman's record has been lower in recent years on many issues is that many organizations count failing to show up for a vote as equivalent to NO votes. For most 2003 and the beginning of 2004, Joe Lieberman was busy running for president and missed a lot of votes. Here are his scores for 2003 and 2004 for a bunch of organizations which do this if you simply don't include missed votes when calculating the rating.
Please don't ever use the exact same tactics that George W. Bush (by which I mean his advisers) used to make John Kerry look like the most liberal guy in the Senate (they used his voting record from 2003 from the National Journal, when he missed a lot of votes. However, since the National Journal does not count missed votes when determining its ratings and John Kerry only bothered to come back to the Senate on close votes where pretty much every Democrat was also voting the "liberal" position, he ended up with virtually no "conservative" votes and thus got ranked the most liberal.) Thank you for reading this and I hope to read your reply to this here.
So anyway, here are the rankings for Senator Lieberman adjusted in the way I described above.
2003 League of Conservation Voters: 100% (7 "good" votes, with one of the "good" votes counted twice because the LCV felt it was especially important, 0 "bad" votes, and 11 missed votes)
2004 League of Conservation Voters: He got 100% here by their standards (6 votes, all of which were "good" votes, and no missed votes. You (hopefully unintentionally) took his overall 108th Congress score (which was 56%) to be his 2004 score (the reason 100% in 2004 and 42% in 2003 gives him 56% overall is that there were many more votes in 2003 than in 2004, and they calculate the score like so: round(goodvotes * 100 / totalvotes)
U.S. Public Interest Group 2004: 92% (11 "good" votes, 1 "bad" vote, 8 missed votes.
U.S. Public Interest Group 2003: no missed votes
Americans for Democratic Action 2003: 100%( 14 "good" votes, 0 "bad" votes, 6 missed votes)
Americans
Americans for Democratic Action 2004: no more missed votes than normal for a Senator.
You might have made the argument that Lieberman has been voting a little less liberal without using Rove-style tactics, and if you couldn't have, then you should stick with bashing him for his support of the war, "criticism" of Democrats, and camaraderie with right-wingnuts. For shame.
DemocraticLuntz (chose the bobdoleisevil name well before I chose my dailykos.com name, and it seems too much trouble to switch names now).