Don’t get me wrong … this is not an anti- Bernie Sanders diary. I’m a huge fan of his, and have been a fan going way back since the start of his political career in Burlington, VT. As a personal aside, I always conflate Sanders with Vermont itself, a place very special to me as the site of my 2010 marriage to another man when such marriages were not yet legal in Maryland where I live.
But, I also like Hillary Clinton a lot and wanted to point out that, objectively, I’m not sure Sanders is necessarily any more progressive than Hillary.
Perhaps the only real way to measure this is to compare Sanders’ and Hillary’s actual Senate voting records during the period of time when they were in Congress together, an apples-to-apples comparison, so to speak. Back during the 2008 campaign another DK diary did just that (link below), and determined that, based on an average of voting ratings from the liberal ADA and the conservative ACU, Sanders had a 95.7 rating while Hillary was at 94.4 (the same rating as Ted Kennedy at the time). I’m not really sure if the 1.3 point difference is really statistically significant.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
So, while I understand that a lot of emotional energy goes into advocacy for both Sanders and Hillary, one thing we should look at, as Democrats who ultimately have the same goal of progressive governance, are the candidates’ actual records from their time in office.