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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLeft-right presidential swings since Truman
This is interesting. One need not take it as gospel, but you can find more about the assumptions and methodolgy at the bottom link. The fact that it purs Obama to the right of other Dems is not (in my view) about him personally as much as the fact that the national center has been moving rightward (certainly where money is concerned) since at least 1980.
It is interesting to see someone try to represent, in some way, how very large the difference between parties is versus the small differences within the parties.
Obama the Moderate
...
Ive long been a great admirer of the work done by Poole and his collaborators. What they do is use roll-call votes to map politicians positions into an abstract issue space. You can think of this as a sort of iterative process: start with a guess about how to rank bills from left to right, use that ranking to place politicians along the same spectrum, revise the ranking of bills based on the politicians, and repeat until convergence. What they actually do is more complicated and flexible, and allows for multiple dimensions; but that sort of gets at the general idea.
And it turns out that US politics really is one-dimensional, that once you know where politicians stand on a scale that clearly has to do with taxation and the size of the welfare state, you can predict their votes very well. There used to be a second dimension, clearly corresponding to race; but once the Dixiecrats became Republicans, that dimension collapsed into the first.
The new result comes from identifying cases where presidents clearly endorsed or opposed legislation, and using those cases to place presidents on the left-right scale. Heres what they find, with up meaning moves to the right, down moves to the left:
...
Im not bashing Obama, by the way; I wish he took stronger stands, but I think hes moving in that direction; also, even if his health reform was devised by Heritage and implemented by Mitt Romney, its a lot better than nothing.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/obama-the-moderate/
http://voteview.com/blog/?p=317
MFrohike
(1,980 posts)Can't seem to find a list of the votes that make up the basis of this graph. I find it kind of unbelievable that Carter and Clinton are somehow to the left to LBJ. I can find a bunch of gobbledegook about the use of roll call votes when I click through Krugman's cited source, but somehow the exact votes and the methodology as to what constitutes "clearly supports/opposes" seems to be missing. Hell, what constitutes left/right in this graph is missing. Is free trade left or right? What about voting rights? Are tax incentives/expenditures generally one or the other or does it break down depending on the exact tax under consideration?
Additionally, I find this whole exercise suspect because it doesn't take non-legislative actions into account. How do you measure the use of executive orders by presidents who did not do well with Congress, like Kennedy and Truman?
I don't think this graph is terribly useful. Its results are pretty suspect from the start. How is Carter, as president, to the left of every Democratic president since Truman? Carter and Clinton were fans of deregulation, yet they're on the left? What?
cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)attempt to quantify ill-defined terms will be. There's not really a "right" answer to liberal and conservative.
And I think almost anyone would rank the republicans that way - Ike a moderate, Nixon surprisingly moderate domestically, GW Bush to Reagan's right, Papa Bush less extreme than Reagan... if a method gets that right (which it appears to) then it is interesting to see how it ranks other things, even if one disagrees with the conclusion.
It's interesting stuff though. For instance, this (below) is intriguing:
http://voteview.com/blog/?p=284
MFrohike
(1,980 posts)It's fantasy to try to quantify this sort of thing. The use of statistics is valid when you're dealing with data that is readily quantifiable. This data doesn't lend itself to being quantified, nor is the methodology clear. I just don't care for trying to graft statistical analysis to every subject. It's been pretty damn disastrous in economics and I don't expanding the reach of the "statistics uber alles" mindset is a wise move.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)That was interesting. It seems like it may be valuable for single bills and maybe issues. I don't think it scales up so well when you have to weight social vs. economic issues, state vs. individual, and the like. That being said, in a simple form, it may be useful.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)It's an abstract model to be sure.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)chart is absurd. Let's see Clinton was pro-deregulation, he signed welfare reform, DADT, DOMA, NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Enron loophole, declared the era of big government is over.
Mr. Obamas third State of the Union address is widely seen in parallel with the one delivered in 1996 by President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton likewise was seeking re-election, after voters in the midterm elections had put Republicans in power in Congress as a rebuke to his perceived big-government liberalism.
Yet Mr. Obama is charting an opposite response. While Mr. Clinton sought to co-opt Republicans small-government message his State of the Union line the era of big government is over is among the most memorable of his presidency Mr. Obama is confronting it, and framing the election-year debate in a way that aides say will challenge Republicans view of the role of government in a time of economic transition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/us/politics/obama-to-draw-an-economic-line-in-state-of-union.html
This chart is suppose to show Clinton is more liberal than LBJ and Truman? Even Carter was pro-deregulation. He was, in fact, a conservative Democrat.
It's rather interesting that Obama ends up on the same line as LBJ, father of the Great Society. The chart uses an odd model to basically rewrite history in favor of Clinton as the great liberal (it seems an ongoing project). What hogwash.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)And consistency is something I admire in politicians, since typically they're two faced.
And if he makes a move to the left, with a new populism as it appears he is doing...
...then you can expect his graph to actually change.
cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)the small differences between parties.
Ike was quite moderate, but it's interesting to see a measure whereby even an okay republican is well to the right of the D-range.
And the general move rightward of both parties after the 1970s.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)Utterly fascinating.
cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)close, but to the left.
http://www.voteview.com/recentpolitics.asp
http://voteview.com/Clinton_and_Obama.htm
And a ranking of everyone who served in congress 1937-2002, which is cool. (Ron Paul is the most conservative of the 3320 people on the list by their reckoning of conservative vs. liberal. Russ Feingold is remarkably high on the liberal list -- it's typically harder for senators since they represent a whole state, but he's well up there.)
http://www.voteview.com/Is_John_Kerry_A_Liberal.htm
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)...since the 100th or so Congress. I am quite fascinated by these results.
absurdity:
307 TENNESS D FORD, HAROLD -0.421
478 MASSACH D KERRY,JOHN F. -0.366
So Clinton and Harold Ford are more liberal than Kerry?
Looks like they came up with a model to put people whereever the hell they want to on their scale.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)You cannot compare a President to a Congressperson using this method.
They are compared against one another. So basically Presidents get a kick to the left or right because they have a smaller sample.
Our findings here echo those discussed in a prior post that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats to the left in the contemporary period. Indeed, as seen below, President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II, while President George W. Bush was the most conservative president in the post-war era.
http://voteview.com/blog/?p=317
"presidential ideal points are somewhat biased towards the ideological extremes You cannot compare a President to a Congressperson using this method."
...does that mean? The methodology is bizarre.
And they end up with:
99 NEW YOR D KOCH, EDWARD I. -0.516
177 VERMONT I SANDERS, BERNARD -0.472
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)ProSense
(116,464 posts)" It's not a left right scale."
...they seem to disagree with you:
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)It would've been nice if you had provided the link.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"It would've been nice if you had provided the link."
...in the comment I responded to.