It's just not looking good for the "Hillary Clinton is a conserva-Dem" crowd. Bad enough that Kos called her a true liberal, but hey, what does that guy know about anything anyway, right? But this, coming from the political statistics mavens at FiveThirtyEight.com, has gotta hurt:
We’ve gotten this raft of “Clinton is liberal” exposés as Clinton has revved up her 2016 campaign, speaking out in support of gay marriage, a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally, and criminal justice reform. But what many of these articles miss is that Clinton has always been, by most measures, pretty far to the left. When she’s shifted positions, it has been in concert with the entire Democratic Party.
To arrive at this conclusion, writer Harry Enten uses FiveThirtyEight's usual method of examining a candidate's voting record, public statements, and fundraising. On each metric, Enten writes, Clinton has compiled a track record of liberalism.
To examine Clinton's voting record, FiveThirtyEight turns to Voteview's analysis of Congressional voting records. I wrote a diary about this data a few months ago, wherein I demonstrated that Hillary Clinton was the 11th most liberal member of the Senate during her tenure there, according to the DW-NOMINATE methodology, placing her solidly within the liberal wing of the party. Enten comes to the same conclusion, noting that Clinton's record was more liberal than 70 percent of Democrats in her final term in the Senate.
Enten also calls attention to Clinton's history of very liberal public statements:
Clinton rates as a “hard core liberal” per the OnTheIssues.org scale. She is as liberal as Elizabeth Warren and barely more moderate than Bernie Sanders. And while Obama is also a “hard core liberal,” Clinton again was rated as more liberal than Obama.
Regarding fundraising, Enten only notes that Hillary has had a more liberal donor base than her husband Bill had, according to Adam Bonica's
fundraising scores. That link is paywalled, so we have to take Enten's word for this. The (admittedly somewhat out-of-date) campaign finance information for Clinton available at
opensecrets.org doesn't look particularly liberal to me, although I suppose you could make the case that there isn't anything out of the ordinary there in the current age of legalized bribery. Still, even granting that the list of major Clinton donors through the 2008 cycle is heavier in Wall Street figures and other plutocrats than we would like it to be, that just puts her in the position of taking their money and voting against them anyway, something the late great Molly Ivins used to say was the hallmark of a good politician.
If the standard for liberalism is set by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, then yes, Hillary Clinton falls short of that, and if those two fine Democrats represent the threshold of acceptability for you, then you will be disappointed by a Hillary Clinton administration, as you will be disappointed by every presidential administration from now until the day you die. But it's simply not possible to argue with any credibility that Hillary Clinton, through her words and deeds, does not lie squarely in the liberal mainstream of the Democratic Party. The data just doesn't support it.