On 2/25/2011 12:22 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> What to make of this? What to make of the fact that Dem leader Harry Reid’s voting record ties him with the nominal socialist Bernie Sanders to put them both among the most liberal members of the Senate? Politics certainly doesn’t feel polarized—there looks to be a suffocating consensus in favor of the status quo. Is it that one party is insanely right wing and the other is just tepidly so? Is that what polarization looks like?
There's a misunderstanding of the concept of Congressional polarization. It's about relative positioning, not absolute positioning. In other words, it's not about ideological intensity, it's about ideological consistency.
Polarization doesn't mean that those toward the left are moving further left and those toward the right are moving further right. It just means those more toward the left are getting more consistent in their more-left voting, while those toward the right getting more consistent in their more-right voting. It means that Chuck Schumer is voting with Republicans a smaller percentage of the time - not that the bills Schumer is voting for are becoming more boldly liberal.
National Journal only calculates who voted with whom - it doesn't evaluate the "liberalness" or "conservativeness" of the underlying bills being voted on.
SA