abrisaham I know Simon but the great mantra from Obama is that we must all surrender a bit of ourselves to get along.  Or at least thats what Im getting. Now on the school yard when you are fighting over the swing the teachers says share and we all know what that means.  When Obama says it.........well great but what does that actually mean?  I mean share what?  Share values? What I have is a set of values and the democratic party has a set of policies that enforce and support my core values.  Obama wants us to compromise on those Values which in effect is to compromise on those policies. I just want to know from the Obama Supporters that as a Supporter of Hillary and a liberal which one should I give up first.  Second.  Third. Hillary makes no bones about it.  She wants to fight for my beliefs.  McCain and Romney want to fight for their beliefs but Obama wants me to surrender. Okay  Where do I start??

Alan Stewart Carl I'm late to this conversation, but I have a few things to say. 1) these ratings are more about who is more partisan than more liberal, although there is overlap 2) based on all evidence, Obama and Hillary would promote almost identical policies if elected ... in that case, what does it matter if moderates/centrists prefer Obama over Hillary? The ONLY DIFFERENCE between them is rhetoric and Obama has the more moderate rhetoric 3) For those who want change (and a lot of moderates are more akin to independents seeking change), Obama represents a much greater degree of change than any other candidate. Some people don't vote based on policy preferrences. They vote based on gut feeling. That drives people like Michael crazy, but it's actually not an invalid way to vote. After all, a lot of being president is about character rather than policy. If some moderates prefer Obama's character, why act like they're being irrational?

Simon Abrisaham:

[T]he great mantra from Obama is that we must all surrender a bit of ourselves to get along.

But he's not talking to people like you! He's saying that people like me have to surrender a bit in order that we can all get along. Everything about him screams the achievement of consensus by the silencing and sublimation of dissenters from the liberal line.

Simon Alan, if these "ratings are more about who is more partisan than more liberal," how does that help your case? You really want to make the argument that these figures don't prove Obama's a liberal, only that he's a democratic partisan? Really?

C Stanley

If some moderates prefer Obama’s character, why act like they’re being irrational?

By your own admission ("They vote based on gut feeling."), they're being irrational- even if that word is a bit more prejorative than I would use. But still, a definition of irrational is:

not governed by or according to reason

And that fits with 'vote based on gut feeling.'

Alan Stewart Carl Simon: best I can tell, they base the ratings on whether or not a congressman or woman votes for a Democratic generated or Republican generated bill. While Democratic bills are generally going to be more liberal, they don't have to be radically liberal or even that far off center. Some people seem to be using this rating to claim Obama is a radical -- all it shows is he's a strong partisan. That's not good for his uniter cred, but it doesn't mean he's necessarily outside the mainstream in his beliefs. C -- uh, yeah, bad word choice on my part. I shouldn't have said gut feeling. I should have used something like "character traits." My main point is that many people can be inspired by a leader who doesn't preach their gospel but is nonetheless a compelling person they can trust. I don't think that's irrational, although it's not as pragmatic as voting based on issues.

C Stanley I get that, Alan, and in private life and personal relationships I think it makes sense to trust intuition and base trust on general sense of character of a person. I can't agree with doing that in politics though (at least, not doing it purposefully- I think everyone does it to some extent by reflex) because candidates are so packaged and focus group tested. Because I know that a candidate is being marketed to appeal to my gut instincts, I'm more wary of it and try to avoid making decisions on that basis unless the evidence is pretty supportive that my sense of the person's character is correct.

PatHMV How the lists are generated depends on the organization, of course. But most of them are not just partisan mouthpieces. They may be strongly aligned to one party or the other (NARAL to the Democrats, for example), but the purpose of the groups is to put serious pressure on individual representatives to vote in line with the views of that organization. The key to look at is the selection, in each voting scorecard, of which votes they track. Each organization  picks the bills most important to IT, not to the party with which they may be aligned. In fact, if you look through most lists, the Members of Congress who are most generally considered moderate or centrist show up in the middle of the rankings. In the aggregate, they demonstrate pretty well how tightly a politician's voting records line are aligned with the "party line" on particular issues. Senators like Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson, well known as moderates, actually having voting scorecard records to back up that reputation. I did an extensive post or comment once on which party had the most "moderates" in it which had some good data, but I can't find it at the moment. You might take a look at some of the numbers Simon cited in one of his early posts on this topic, almost a year ago: <a href="http://stubbornfacts.us/politics/centrism/barak_obama_centrist">Barak Obama, "Centrist"</a>. In short, those scorecards, taken in the aggregate, do a pretty good job of showing where a candidate stands in particular issue areas when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, actual VOTES in Congress. We can look at the overall history of the voting records and see that politicians who are widely perceived as centrist or moderate actually do have their moderation reflected in the scorecards. Obama's votes, reflected in the scorecards, provide strong evidence that he's not actually a centrist or moderate when it comes time to actually take action.

C Stanley Pat: quite true, that the various lists are generated by different criteria. One thing that I think is important to note is that sometimes the scorecard is based on 'votes with party' and other times it's based on 'votes with interest group'. Assuming that you could put together a conglomerate of all interest groups and define which ones really represent a 'true north' for conservatism or liberalism, you could then rank the candidates accordingly by those types of scorecards. And then you could also find trends in whether a party is drifting rightward or leftward, based on the deviation between the 'votes with party' scorecards and the 'votes with interest group' ones (again, assuming those interest groups represented a pure core principle of the party's reported ideology.) In other words, if the GOP has drifted away from hard right, then the party scorecard would show people with high partisan rankings being lower on the interest group scorecard than they were when the party was more conservative. Those people would reliably be voting with party, but that position wouldn't match up as neatly with the 'true conservative' position. What I find interesting about that, too, though, is that it seems to me that this leaves an opportunity to exploit (and I think some special interests have done so), to define themselves as the true conservatives so that people within the party who don't tow their line become heretics.

abrisaham Im still wondering which values I have to surrender.  An email to the Barak Obama camp nets no response. All I hear here is our conservative brethren saying no your missing it.  Its the conservatives who have to surrender their values. So now Im confused who has to give up what when Obama is elected president?