Most liberal senator

Supposedly it's Barack Obama. Just like it was once supposedly John Kerry. Yes, yes. This stuff always becomes campaign fodder. And I guess there's no stopping that. But I think progressive commentators everywhere really ought to avoid burning a lot of pixels ruminating about who this helps and hurts electorally, and instead should call bullshit on the rankings themselves.

On almost any of the major votes that Obama missed, you'll find that men like Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders were usually on hand, making phone calls, rallying their colleagues, and voting the right way. More to the point, those men advocate from the floor for progressive positions, with passion, every week while Barack Obama does not. Yes, passion is hard to gauge. But instead of trying (by, say, logging hours spent speaking at hearings, from the chamber, etc., and assigning those a value to be paired with voting records) National Journal relies instead on a weird system by which a senator who takes the "liberal" position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50.

For that matter, it's unclear how they define "liberal" in the first place. Apparently

The analysis also revealed which yea votes correlated with which nay votes within each issue area (members voting yea on certain issues tended to vote nay on others). The yea and nay positions on each roll call were then identified as conservative or liberal.

Umm... ok. But what happens to the nuance? Occasionally you'll find that the left-most members of the Senate (or the Congress) will vote alongside the right-most flank to kill a bill that liberals think too conservative, and conservatives think too liberal. So if Bernie Sanders votes alongside Jon Kyl to kill a hypothetical, but center-driven, bill co-sponsored by Barack Obama and George Voinovich, who's taking the conservative position?

All of which is to say that this is philistinism masquerading as social science--it's the U.S. News College Guide of Washington politics. Journalists ought to understand that. And those of conscience ought to ignore it, or lay it bare, but certainly not feed into it.