Hillary Clinton Was the 11th Most Liberal Member of the Senate - Daily KOS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/31/1374629/-Hillary-Clinton-Was-the-11th-Most-Liberal-Member-of-the-SenateThat's not my opinion. That's what the data says.
DW-NOMINATE is a method for analyzing data on preferences, such as voting data, developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Unlike the scoring done by interest groups, DW-NOMINATE doesn't rely on subjective determinations of what constitutes a liberal vote or a conservative vote--it sorts members of a population according to how similar each member's choices are to those of other members of the population. Two senators who vote the same way 90 percent of the time will be much closer to each other than two senators who only vote the same way 10 percent of the time. Poole and Rosenthal have used this method to discover some interesting statistics and trends going back to the First Congress in 1787-89.
Using House and Senate roll call votes as inputs, DW-NOMINATE has been used to chart every member of every Congress in a two-dimensional space. The primary dimension corresponds strongly to conventional notions of the liberal-conservative axis in modern politics, while the significance of the secondary axis tends to change over time (traditionally it tended to highlight the distance between Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democratic party; today it's kind of a more nebulous indicator of social and cultural differences and is, in my opinion, not particularly interesting). The point is that we can sort the members of a particular Congress by their scores on the primary dimension to easily rank them from most liberal to most conservative based entirely on their own voting data.
And when we do this for the period in which Hillary Clinton was in the Senate, here's what we get:
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As it turns out, with a first-dimension score of -0.391 based upon her entire service in Congress, Hillary Clinton was the 11th most liberal member of the Senate in each of the 107th, 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. That places her slightly to the left of Pat Leahy (-0.386), Barbara Mikulski (-0.385) and Dick Durbin (-0.385); clearly to the left of Joe Biden (-0.331) and Harry Reid (-0.289); and well to the left of moderate Democrats like Jon Tester (-0.230), Blanche Lincoln (-0.173), and Claire McCaskill (-0.154).
Some more numbers from the 110th Congress, to further help put things in perspective:
Most liberal Dem 1 Sanders -0.523
11 CLINTON -0.391
Median Dem 33 Biden -0.331
Most conservative Dem 51 B. Nelson -0.035
Most liberal Rep 52 Specter 0.061
Median Rep 76 McConnell 0.409
Most conservative Rep 101 Coburn 0.809
Oh, and a certain junior Senator from Illinois, Obama I think his name was? At -0.367, he ranked 23rd in the 110th Congress.
Comparing votes is hardly a perfect way to measure ideology, but it is by far the best method available to bring a measure of quantitative rigor to this inherently subjective topic, and political scientists and statisticians have long relied on DW-NOMINATE for insights about politics and voting behavior. (Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.com make extensive use of it to power their own results, for example.)
Like everyone else on Earth who does not wear my clothes and kiss my wife in the morning, Hillary Clinton disagrees with me on some things. The same is true for everyone here, and some of those differences may be profound. That is a conversation we can have. But suggestions that she is "a liberal republican or a conservative dem," to take one example of a quotation I read today, should stop here. By her voting record in Congress, Hillary Clinton is squarely in the mainstream of the national Democratic party in America, and would be a good ideological fit for it as its nominee. If anyone tries to tell you differently, ask them to show their work.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Once she participated in that lie, she did not take steps to FIX HER MISTAKE (like working to prosecute the people who lied us into a war).
You have to ignore her lack of action on issues like unions at Walmart while she was a highly compensated board member, then what appears to be Clinton "pay to play" with them donating the corporate jet for Bill's travel during his first presidential run, followed by his implementing trade policies that benefitted Walmart while screwing American manufacturing.
You have to ignore her publicly lying to the American people while she was First Lady ("vast right wing conspiracy" versus lying dog of a husband), and the self inflicted scandals during that term. "Lost" billing records that magically turned up? Fired travel staff, reinstated after a lawsuit? The Lincoln bedroom debacle?
You might call her a "liberal" senator, but some of her "non-liberal" positions were flat out horrific - the cluster bombs that were killing children are particularly egregious and that whole "flag burning" thing was just stupid.
You have to ignore that her tenure at Secretary of State is appalling. The emails showing she was lying to the public by pretending to want to restore the democratically elected president in Hondorus while actively working behind the scenes to make sure that didn't happen are an embarrassment to this country. Libya is another example of her errors in judgment and the videos of her "embracing our Libyan partners" followed by "we came, we saw, he died" is simply sickening. Her tenure made the world less safe and thirty seconds of googling gives examples from all political spectrums.
You have to ignore her flouting the law and holding herself above it while SoS by not complying with the Federal Records Act (inclusive of Obama's memos, etc.) and the FOIA laws, and that is assuming you want to ignore her pretence of ignorance about how the internet works and the clear instructions on safely managing government communication she was given by staff ("don't use a blackberry or private email"
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Lastly, you have to ignore the reality that she is currently under a year long INVESTIGATION by the FBI which investigates public corruption and dangers to national security. You ignore her lack of candor about the topic by referring to it as a "security review", a phrase which was accurate for five minutes before the FBI decided the "review" warranted "investigation". You ignore the fact a key witness -- Hillary Clinton's IT guy -- pleaded the fifth amendment to avoid INCRIMINATING HIMSELF before being given IMMUNITY from CRIMINAL charges. That's not an "oops" -- that is a Red Flag that the FBI is investigating CRIMES. You also ignore the 38 civil lawsuits that resulted from her actions so far, and so far two judges have indicated she is going to be testifying under oath in the cases that are at discovery so far -- only 36 more to go!
So a post calling her liberal is laughable on its face, because the only way this stands is if you avoid her "non-liberal" position which requires ignoring any facts that you don't like. Hillary's website, which many of her supporters are relying on, is a marketing tool. I suggest they head over to Wikileaks and start reading her damn emails to see what she was really saying, or watch the New York Times video on her and Libya or spend fifteen minutes reading some of the information googled on "Hillary foreign policy failures" so you can learn why most of America doesn't want her anywhere near the White House.
The information is out there, "but there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see" so odds are good you won't do it, and will thus remain confused as to why people who have done their homework are so outright hostile to her.
And that makes the post unbelievablely sad. 
Please Note: I am now using cut/paste/mild edit to reply to repetitive talking points which can be refuted with minimal effort. This post does not contain any reference to her stated willingness to discuss constitutional restrictions on abortion or long standing opposition to marriage equality.
everyone knows that daily kos is just as far right as fox news.
Bernie sanders is the only true democrat,everyone even a tiny bit to the right of him is a republican stooge.
