KOA's Rosen let Gingrich repeat talking point that Obama is "the most liberal member of the Senate"

Summary: Interviewing former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) on February 21, Newsradio 850 KOA's Mike Rosen uncritically allowed him to echo the talking point that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is "the most liberal member of the Senate." Rosen and Gingrich omitted that the National Journal, whose ratings Gingrich cited, has changed its methodology since acknowledging a flaw in a previous vote rating, and that a respected study by two political science professors ranked Obama as tied with Democratic Sen. Joe Biden as the 10th "most liberal" senator in 2007.

Appearing on the February 21 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Mike Rosen Show to promote his book Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works" (Regnery, January 2008), former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) parroted the conservative talking point that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (IL) "was voted by National Journal as the most liberal member of the Senate." Gingrich further claimed that Obama "would take us down the kind of changes that made Argentina hopeless economically, the kind of changes that have made a number of European welfare-state countries ineffective." Neither Gingrich nor Rosen described the criteria that the National Journal used to classify Obama as the "most liberal" U.S. senator, and both failed to mention a highly respected study by political science professors Jeff Lewis and Keith Poole that ranked Obama as tied with Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) as the 10th "most liberal" senator in 2007, as Media Matters for America has noted. Rosen and Gingrich also failed to point out that the National Journal has acknowledged a flaw in a previous vote rating and has since changed its methodology.

In making his assertion, Gingrich echoed other conservative commentators who have made the same "most liberal" senator claim, citing the National Journal's 2007 vote ratings. As Colorado Media Matters noted, on his February 13 broadcast, 630 KHOW-AM's Dan Caplis stated that Obama is "obviously" the "most liberal senator" and further claimed, "[T]hat's objective criteria applied there."

From the February 21 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Mike Rosen Show:

ROSEN: His book, Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. Good to have him back with us again. Newt, wonderful to talk to you. How are things going?

GINGRICH: They're going very well. In fact, we're very excited, because Real Change stayed at number three on The New York Times booklist for the third week in a row. So we feel that the message of the concepts of real change and the idea of the platform of the American people and ideas that bring us together is actually making some progress.

ROSEN: When I saw the title of the book, one question immediately concerned, occurred to me. Of course, these books are sometimes years in the making. Did the title come before Barack Obama adopted "change" and "hope" as his campaign slogans, or is this a response to Barack Obama's version of change?

GINGRICH: Look, to make things even funnier, last year I both wrote Real Change in August and September -- and Regnery worked with us in picking the title a long time ago -- and last year we developed an organization called American Solutions, which our listeners can see if they go to AmericanSolutions.com. Now we have Barack Obama campaigning as the candidate of change; although I would argue it's the wrong change. And you have Senator Clinton campaigning with signs that say "Solutions for America." Now, I'm not sure how big the gap is between "American Solutions" and "Solutions for America," but I'm very flattered that these ideas are being picked up.

ROSEN: What's the difference between your notion of change and Barack Obama's notion of change?

GINGRICH: Well, I think Senator Obama, who was voted by National Journal as the most liberal member of the Senate, would take us down the kind of changes that made Argentina hopeless economically, the kind of changes that have made a number of European welfare-state countries ineffective. You know, the changes we need are changes away from bureaucracy, away from rigid unionized work rules, towards a more productive, more investment-centered America with every American worker having the best technology, the best equipment, the best education. That's a more flexible, more creative, more dynamic America. And there's nothing in the allies who are trying to elect Senator Obama that would lead one to believe that they are going to produce that kind of outcome.

ROSEN: Let me use an analogy that isn't perfect, but it makes my point: If the former Soviet Union, if Russia now would undergo change to revert to the kind of purely communist system they had years ago, that would qualify as change, but it wouldn't be anything new; it would be a reversion. After Bill Clinton announced that the era of big government is over, it seems to me the kind of change that Barack Obama is talking about is a return to the era of big government.

GINGRICH: Well, that's right.

Rosen and Gingrich both failed to elaborate on the criteria the National Journal used to rank Obama "the most liberal member of the Senate," and neither mentioned the results of the Lewis-Poole study that ranked Obama as tied with Biden as the 10th "most liberal" senator in 2007. The system used in that study, developed by Poole and political science professor Howard Rosenthal, has become widely used and cited among political scientists (see here for a list of academic studies that have utilized the Poole-Rosenthal system to evaluate legislative votes in both the U.S. and other countries). The Poole-Rosenthal ratings have several advantages over the National Journal ratings, most notably that the former use every non-unanimous vote cast by every legislator to determine his or her relative ideology, as Media Matters pointed out.

According to the National Journal, its 27th annual vote ratings of members of Congress were based on a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by the publication's reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories: economic, social, and foreign policy. As Media Matters has pointed out, among the "liberal" positions Obama took that purportedly earned him the distinction were his votes to implement the bipartisan 9-11 Commission's homeland security recommendations, provide more children with health insurance, permit federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and maintain a federal minimum wage.

Furthermore, Media Matters has noted (here, here, and here) that the National Journal changed its methodology after it rated Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) as the "most liberal senator" of 2003 and later acknowledged that the methodology it used to rate Kerry was flawed.

Media Matters has further pointed out that the National Journal Group recently sent an email to readers calling attention to its 2007 ratings and touting the results of its 2003 ratings, which labeled then-presidential candidate Kerry as the most liberal senator -- despite its recent admission that the 2003 ratings were flawed because Kerry had missed a significant number of the votes that the study had analyzed. According to editor Charles Green, the magazine was aware of the issue at the time, but decided to publish the ratings anyway and change its methodology later, rather than "change the rules in the middle of the game ... after we learned Kerry's ranking." Under the new methodology applied in the 2007 study, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (AZ) did not receive a rating because he missed too many votes; Media Matters has documented that numerous media outlets have reported Obama's rating without mentioning that McCain missed too many votes to be evaluated.

—C.H. & J.F.B.