Party, Not Kerry, Moved to Left
By Jeffery A. Jenkins
Jeffery A. Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for
Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208.
John Kerry’s
political ascension has not gone unnoticed by Republican Party
operatives.
As his successes
have mounted, concerns have been raised about Kerry’s ideological makeup. For example, Terry Holt, the
spokesman for President Bush’s reelection campaign, has characterized
Kerry as culturally out of sync with most Americans, while Ed Gillespie,
Republican National Committee Chairman, claims Kerry is firmly
entrenched among “the extreme elements of his party.”
In short,
Kerry is being painted as the prototypical “Massachusetts
liberal,” alongside such past and present Republican bogeymen
as the “soft-on-crime” Michael Dukakis and the “welfare-loving” Edward
(Ted) Kennedy.
Is he?
A careful analysis indicates he is not. In fact, he is solidly
ensconced in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, slightly
left of center.
Currently
at issue is John Kerry’s voting record. As has
become custom in recent elections, party strategists (on both sides
of the aisle) have used individual votes to paint broad strokes
about a candidate’s ideological predilections.
In this case,
Republican party strategists have highlighted several of Kerry’s recent and past Senate roll-call votes to make
the claim that he is outside of the mainstream; some of these votes
include his opposition to banning partial-birth abortion, his opposition
to prohibiting same-sex marriage, his opposition to increased defense
spending, and his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts.
Herein lies
a problem: the use of a very limited (and often unrepresentative)
set of votes to characterize a candidate’s career typically
leads to a distorted view of the true picture. This, of course,
is the intent of political strategists, who attempt to frame candidates
of the opposing party in the most negative light possible.
But this “negative framing” runs counter to the interests
of most Americans, who would prefer to have an objective assessment
of candidates’ records from which they could better determine
their vote choices. But is such an objective assessment in fact
possible? Specifically, in this case, can we obtain a true sense
of where John Kerry stands ideologically?
“Yes” and “yes”.
The current “state of the art” technique
developed by Professors Keith Poole (University of Houston) and
Howard Rosenthal
(Princeton University) is a simple algorithm that incorporates
all roll-call votes cast in a given Congress and generates an ideological
ordering of all members along a basic left-right continuum.
Stated simply,
the Poole-Rosenthal technique takes votes as inputs and yields
ideological “scores,” which can be arranged
from left to right along a line with more liberal members on the
left and more conservative members on the right. I tracked Kerry’s
Poole-Rosenthal scores across time and evaluated them relative
to those of his fellow Senate Democrats.
Where does John Kerry lie within his own party?
I find that in the first four Congresses in which John Kerry
served, the 99th through 102nd Congresses, his Poole-Rosenthal
scores suggest that he was in fact among the most liberal members
of the Democratic Senate .
However, beginning in the 103rd Congress and extending through
the current 108th Congress, Kerry is positioned closer to the center
of his Democratic Senate delegation.
One inference to draw from the previous findings is that Kerry
moderated his positions over time. In fact, this inference would
be incorrect.
Kerry’s Poole-Rosenthal scores appear more centrist in
recent Congresses because while Kerry’s views and accompanying
vote choices have remained essentially constant over his career,
the rest of his party has moved to the left.
Thus, Kerry has remained quite true to his ideological predilections
across his two decades in Congress; those predilections placed
him in the extreme liberal end of the Democratic Party twenty years
ago, while those same predilections place him more toward the center
of the Democratic Party today.
A simple comparison drives home this latter point.
In being painted as a Massachusetts liberal by Republican strategists,
Kerry has found himself compared to Senator Edward Kennedy, a longstanding
lightning rod among conservative Republicans. The Poole-Rosenthal
scores can be used to investigate this assertion.
First, Kerry
and Kennedy do in fact appear ideologically similar early in
Kerry’s career; however, while both are positioned
in the extreme liberal end of the party, Kennedy is always further
to the left than Kerry. Over time, Kerry and Kennedy have separated.
Kerry has maintained his basic ideological position, while Kennedy
(mirroring the trend in the party) has become more liberal. As
a result, while Kerry now appears to be in the left-center quartile
of the party, Kennedy has never strayed from the left quartile.
In summary, despite the claims of Republican strategists, John
Kerry is no extremist.
Whether Kerry
is “out of step with where the American people
are,” as was suggested recently by Ralph Reed, a Bush-Cheney
campaign advisor, is another question.
This has more
to do with the current “mood” in the
nation, whether the public believes that more liberal or conservative
policies should be pursued in the future. While opinion polls are
often used to tap into the public’s mood, should Kerry’s
primary and caucus successes continue, then a more definitive answer
can be achieved.
That is, the citizenry will be able to determine directly just
who is out of step this November. |