Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK), one of the more conservative members of the House Democratic caucus, has announced he will not be endorsing Barack Obama for President, claiming that he needs to represent the views of his conservative Oklahoma district. In doing so, he repeated the silliness that Obama is "the most liberal senator" -- then immediately waffled on his own position by saying he'd vote for Obama at the convention because "this is an important time for our country."
Look, I can understand certain Congressfolk withholding their endorsement due to political pressures (though for advice on how to do without feeding GOP talking points, see how Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-FL) did it in the same article). But I frankly think Rep. Boren is miscalculating his own district. Obama has over-performed in plains states. It'd be one thing if this was in Appalachia, which has shown itself to be uniquely hostile to the Illinois Senator. But there is little indication that middle America will be particularly ill-disposed to Obama this year. If anything, Obama is supposed to help us down-ticket in that region.
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It's still an 18 point Republican district. Oklahoma is a state where Obama performed very poorly. And not all the plains states are the same, the history of race relations in Oklahoma is very different than in Kansas and the plains states farther North. For one thing, though it wasn't a state, Oklahoma, fought for the confederacy. Plus it was settled by very different demographics then it's northern neighbors.
Jack has the political calculation of Oklahoma correct, though David still is right that no member of the Democratic caucus ought to be repeating GOP talking points about the party's candidate. Mahoney got the graceful way for a very conservative Democrat in a heavily Republican district to deal with the Obama problem: say that you feel it's inappropriate for you to be "endorsing" any candidate.
the silliness that Obama is "the most liberal senator"
The numbers vary from year to year, but in at least one session of Congress, he was so rated based on his voting record. Is there are evidence that Obama is a moderate, other than his desire to seem that way to the general election electorate?
Also, as a native of the upper midwest, I concur with those who say that you can't equate a state such as Oklahoma with states further north.
Obama has a bipartisan history on anti-proliferation issues, but as an Obama supporter one of the things I like about him is that he's unashamed of his liberalism and still attempts to woo independent and Republican voters. What's so surprising is that this strategy works, I think mostly because of how fed up a lot of people are with Republicans, but also because of a certain Obama cult of personality that makes people, for better or for worse, less concerned with his substantive policy views than his general demeanor.
I've always thought that the appropriate response to someone calling your voting record "one of the most liberal in the Senate" should be "Damn straight", and I think Obama might be the first Democrat who actually gets that. Maybe "liberal" won't be profanity in political discourse anymore, who knows?
'the silliness that Obama is "the most liberal senator"'
The numbers vary from year to year, but in at least one session of Congress, he was so rated based on his voting record. Is there are evidence that Obama is a moderate, other than his desire to seem that way to the general election electorate?
If your determination that Obama is "the most liberal senator" goes by percentage of voting with one's own party during the 110th Congress (which assumes that the position supported by the majority of Democrats is liberal and that supported by the majority of Republicans is conservative), it would be erroneous, according to the Washington Post's tabulation. Durbin, Murray, Cardin, Clinton, Biden, Schumer, Akaka and Brown all have higher percentages of voting with the Democratic majority. McCain voted with the GOP 88.3% of votes for which he was present, which is above the average for Republicans. By these numbers, McCain is little more moderate than Obama. (Individual Democrats can't be fairly compared to Republicans based purely on the percentages, as the Democrats as a group have been more disciplined than the Republicans this term, probably because they hold a narrow majority dependent on Lieberman's good graces, whereas the Republicans have greater incentive to stray.)
Here is the link to the "most liberal senator" rating by National Journal:
http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/
It's one of those rating systems where they take certain key votes during the year, and rank senators on the percentage of times when they took the liberal position.
This type of thing is, I think, a better analysis of ideology than an analysis of party-line voting. The parties are still more ideologically-aligned than they used to be, but still there's a bit of a range. And, of course, this whole string started with a post about a Democratic congressmen who's not ideologically in synch with his party.
I've always thought that the appropriate response to someone calling your voting record "one of the most liberal in the Senate" should be "Damn straight", and I think Obama might be the first Democrat who actually gets that. Maybe "liberal" won't be profanity in political discourse anymore, who knows?
I can understand why many people would react that way, but that does not support the notion that calling Obama most-liberal is silly.
I don't have a problem with the NJ's system per se, but it doesn't work for presidential candidates, who miss most votes but only show up for the really important ones (where they are most likely to vote party line). Particularly since the NJ goes by percentage liberal votes, rather than absolutes, this screws over presidential candidates -- I recall that Obama had actually voted for the liberal position fewer times than many other senators, but he had simply cast fewer votes period, so the percentage still was off.
I couldn't get detail on the National Journal rankings; I'm not a subscriber.
I checked Americans for Democratic Action. Their rankings have historically been the best known rankings of voting records from a liberal perspective.
Obama only missed 5 out of ADA's 20 key votes in 2007, and he supported ADA's position on all of the 15 votes he cast. Harkin, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Brown and Casey were the only other senators with such a perfect record.
In 2006, Obama voted on all 20 of ADA's key votes. He scored a 95 rating, having strayed by supporting the U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement (how naughty of him!). That year, his rating was exceeded by Biden, Durbin, Harkin, Mikulski, Kennedy, Levin, Lautenberg, Bingaman, Schumer, Wyden, Reed and Feingold, but not by a wide margin.
I still see no support for the notion that he's a moderate.
Obama supports free trade, opposes health insurance mandate, single-payer, opposes reparations, opposes gay marriage, supports the death penalty, opposes euthanasia and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants. What you need to support torture or unending war to be a moderate now?
Obama supports free trade
From Obama's campaign website: "Fight for Fair Trade: Obama will fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs. He will use trade agreements to spread good labor and environmental standards around the world and stand firm against agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement that fail to live up to those important benchmarks."
"Fair trade" ain't free trade; it's protectionism.
I wouldn't argue Obama is a "moderate" (like the Blue Dogs), nor is he way outside the Democratic mainstream as some leftist crazy-man. He's a liberal. There are many liberals in the Democratic caucus, with whom he generally swims with. He is not "more liberal" than everybody else, he's just liberal.
"Fair trade" ain't free trade; it's protectionism.
Depends on the type of "fair trade," which is a pretty broad term. If an agreement mandates workplace health & safety and environmental standards, I would consider it to fall into free trade. If it mandates a specific wage to be paid, it's protectionism for American workers.
So far as I know, Obama is not in favor of FTAs that would mandate a specified "living wage" or otherwise make foreign countries lose their wage advantage in competing with American workers.
If an agreement mandates workplace health & safety and environmental standards, I would consider it to fall into free trade. If it mandates a specific wage to be paid, it's protectionism for American workers.
I don't differentiate between those things; they all increase labor costs in the exporting country.
Health and environmental standards are luxury goods. In a developing country, the priority needs to be getting the jobs, in order to lift your population out of absolute poverty. Once a country has achieved economic growth for a period of time (e.g., South Korea)it will have the capacity to raise health and environmental standards. Imposing higher costs on a country that's in an early stage of development will delay its advancement to the developed stage.
Sure, but not everything that increases labor costs in the exporting country is necessarily protectionism for American workers. It also can be a reflection of concern about the welfare of the exporting nation, and with regard to pollution, to the cross-border effects. A country can develop faster in the short term if it puts its children into factories instead of schools, and dumps toxic chemicals in the drinking water instead of disposing of them safely, but that doesn't give the economy much long term strength. As soon as the standard of living begins to rise and people demand more wages, another country that can do the job more cheaply will become the next site, leaving the first behind with a low-skilled populace and a polluted environment.
South Korea, incidentally, had a military dictatorship during the years of its growth, which meant it didn't have to be responsive to its own people's concerns. (China has had a similar "benefit" -- it could choke off population growth and mostly ignore what its people suffered.) As Korea shifted to democracy and the effects of its rapid industrialization were felt, politicians got into trouble even if the problems had been created by their predecessors.
The choice for the poorest countries is not rich country labor standards vs. poor country labor standards. It's poor country labor standards vs. starvation.
Poor countries that have opened themselves up to globalization have achieved economic growth, and thereby acquired the resources to improve education, and other infrastructure. If their labor markets are allowed to operate freely, and their wage levels increase to a level where the lowest-skilled jobs are moving elsewhere, that presumably means that their productivity level has increased to a point where they can take on higher-level work, as is the case with IT workers in India.
There has been much debate about whether democracy or dictatorship best produces the early stages of economic growth in poor countries. The somewhat similar pattern of economic growth in India and China might, superficially at least, be taken to mean that democracy, or lack thereof, is irrelevant to economic growth. I don't think there's a clear answer there.
He is not "more liberal" than everybody else, he's just liberal.
Your original point, as I understood it, was that Obama's ideology and/or voting record, shouldn't make him unpopular in a state such as Oklahoma. I suspect the average Oklahoman isn't going to like either "liberal" or "more liberal".
Obama's image-making effort has been focused on making him seem more moderate than he actually is, in order to extend his support beyond the Democratic base. (Which is not to say that McCain isn't doing something similar on his side.)
There has been much debate about whether democracy or dictatorship best produces the early stages of economic growth in poor countries. The somewhat similar pattern of economic growth in India and China might, superficially at least, be taken to mean that democracy, or lack thereof, is irrelevant to economic growth. I don't think there's a clear answer there.
It is only in a superficial sense that India and China have had a "similar pattern of economic growth. China has gone heavily for capitalistic industrialization, whereas India's stabs at industrialization were along the retarded Soviet five-year line. (Paradoxically, there's more real Communism in India than in China, as Westerners have started to wake up to with regard to the Naxalites.)
Because it is a democracy, India had to invest a little more in its people's education, and had the post-colonial advantage that education was tied to English. Thus, except for a few giants like Mittal, Tata and Reliance, India's economic development has been tied to a service economy -- hi-tech, real estate, construction, media, pharmaceuticals, even finance. Try comparing the sources of wealth for Chinese billionaires versus Indian ones, and you'll see a much higher percentage of the former have their money in manufacturing. China wants to compete with Boeing and Airbus; the surging Indian airlines are happy to use foreign-made planes.
Or to put it more briefly, I think your implication that India got the money to afford to educate its populace only by having low labor and environmental standards that allowed it to out-compete for low-skill manufacturing jobs is just wrong. India has decent natural resources (the British sucked plenty of wealth out for years) and had a happy confluence of events during the 1990s: it reduced the controls on the economy, and it benefited from the globalization of the service industry.
It was educating its people during its moronic quasi-Soviet phase: how do you think there were so many Indian doctors and engineers coming to the U.S. and other English-speaking First World countries in the 1960s and 1970s? (This still worked out to be a good investment for India because those expatriates sent lots of money home and were among the first to invest in India when it became more free market.) Moreover, even in India's poorer years, because the Indian government had to be responsive to the people, it could not afford to be indifferent to major breaches in workplace and environmental safety; after Bhopal, Union Carbide's CEO was even arrested and charged. (Something I doubt you'd see in the U.S., much less in China.) Perhaps a more sensible government would have feared to anger a multinational corporation, but India's had to show that it too was outraged by such indifference to the people's welfare.
"Similar pattern of economic growth" was an unfortunate choice of words. What I meant was that India and China both achieved high growth during roughly similar time periods (1978 to the present in China, and 1991 to the present in India), after having been impoverished in prior years.
India already had a high level of education, at least for some of the population. But how widely had that been available to the total population? According to the theory of development I'm propounding, India's post-1991 economic reforms should eventually lead to educational opportunities and a higher standard of living, even for the rural poor.
I'm thinking of the process Tom Friedman describes in The World is Flat, where the people doing grunt work in the business-process-outsourcing operations gradually acquire both a knowledge of the businesses they work with, and the resources to pursue higher education. Their working conditions would probably not appeal to many of us. On the other hand, people working in that sort of service job are spared the health issues of, for example, Bhopal.
And I didn't mean to imply that the difference between democracy and dictatorship is trivial. I just mean that similar economic growth statistics (both high and low) have been produced in countries with dictatorial and democratic governments.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/13/fmr-senator-finds-sons-decision-not-to-endorse-obama-%e2%80%98puzzling/
Rep. Boren apparently has gotten a time-out from his father.
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