From moderate to partisan
I ran across this information the other day and found it quite interesting. The first graph plots Barack Obama, John McCain, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton according to their voting records. The second plot depicts the same individuals on a scale from moderate to partisan (be it democrat or republican). The surprising observation that John McCain is actually less partisan than Barack Obama. Essentially, Obama is about as liberal as Bush is conservative, while the same comparison applies to McCain and Clinton.
All data is taken from OnTheIssues.org.
August 29th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
That’s actually not all that surprising, depending on what voting records they’re looking at. McCain’s voting record, at least up to 2000, doesn’t line up nicely along the Republican party line (he’s been trending back toward them, thus the “voted with President Bush 90% of the time” line that half of the Democratic speakers used). Barack Obama, by contrast, is very much a liberal (and one of the big successes of his campaign so far has been to play that down, since “liberal” is apparently a dirty word now).