I haven't seen that in her record as a Senator, and even Senator Warren thinks Secretary of State/Senator Clinton should be given a chance.

Don't try to explain that to them....or even easily prove it to them....they now think that Martin O'Malley is some big icon of Liberalism! Countdown till they realize he is not to her left either!!!!

How f*cking Liberal can she really be?

Posts from people who post smilies as rebuttals are not worth reading.

with a potentially serious negative outcome taken by someone who took over your job 2 years ago?

You never did anything stupid when you were in high school?

“Did Hillary like all of Wal-Mart practices? No,” said Garry Mauro, a longtime friend and supporter of the Clintons who sat on the Wal-Mart Environmental Advisory Board with Mrs. Clinton in the late 1980s and worked with her on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

“But,” Mr. Mauro added, “was Wal-Mart a better company, with better practices, because Hillary was on the board? Yes.”

Have you no shame!

Of course President Obama is now much more seasoned and experienced in dealings with the Corp. $hill$-
todays republicans.

The C&L piece linked in the OP is based on this Daily Kos post. The Kos post tosses out some numbers, labels Clinton the 11th most liberal, and concludes, "If anyone tries to tell you differently, ask them to show their work."

Good advice -- so let's apply it to these authors. I clicked through some links and found a bewildering array of more links that lead mainly to more links and to some abstruse explanations of statistical techniques. What I didn't find was what I expected, namely the list of specific votes, with the explanation of what the "liberal" and "conservative" position on each was.

For example, here's Clinton's "National Environmental Scorecard" from the League of Conservation Voters (lifetime score: 82%). The LCV lists the specific votes it scored. If you think that some bills were wrongly included or wrongly omitted, or even that a particular vote should have been scored the opposite way, you have the LCV's data, and you can make your case that Clinton's score is too high or too low.

In a few minutes of clicking, I didn't find the equivalent for the claim that Clinton was the 11th most liberal Senator. I didn't give it the full-court press on research because I think people announcing a conclusion like this should make it reasonably easy for a reader to find the underlying list of votes. If some DUer with more patience than I has found that list, I'd be grateful to be enlightened.

I remember how, during the 2008 campaign, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk touted the National Journal ranking that had Obama as the most liberal Senator in 2007. Plenty of us thought at the time that this was ridiculous. As a liberal Democrat, I would've been delighted if we'd nominated such a liberal candidate, but I knew we hadn't. Events have borne out my belief.

Certainly, during Clinton's time in the Senate, there were plenty of conservative Democrats (the Max Baucus - Blanche Lincoln types), so I wouldn't expect to see her ranked as the least liberal Democrat. Before I give any weight to this purported ranking, though, I need to see the data.

Show your work.

I found a link to an article titled "Singular value decomposition and principal component analysis" with all kinds of statistical legerdemain that was way over my head. My tiny little brain just wanted a list of the votes that were used in determining who's liberal.

C'mon, some people call Rand Paul a liberal. In this instance, the anointment of Hillary Clinton as a liberal appears to have been enthusiastically accepted by people whose preconception it supports, and sneeringly rejected by people whose preconception it contradicts. A fair adjudication between these positions would have to start with the vote list, which the authors have either completely withheld or buried several link-layers deep.

Like the Iraq war, criticizing Obama for not going after Iran, reinstating Glass-Steagall etc.

She had put together committiees, got all the numbers in a row, had the public well on her side of this effort, only to be shot down time after time as the "wifey" only of a man and therefore not able to fully realize what she was trying to acheive. As a political baby in those days, it's when I fully realized what assholes the Republicans were.

not kidding either, she wanted healthcare for all Americans back before it was cool and she was labeled a socialist and such bs

That's quite a feat, considering that the methodology for these surveys is basically to take the votes for the presumptive Democratic nominee and label them as the liberal answer, so that Republicans are always battling "the most liberal senator in Congress".

The methodology is way different than you suppose.

Can you point me to it?

it sorts members of a population according to how similar each member's choices are to those of other members of the population. Two senators who vote the same way 90 percent of the time will be much closer to each other than two senators who only vote the same way 10 percent of the time.

Poole and Rosenthal have used this method to discover some interesting statistics and trends going back to the First Congress in 1787-89.Using House and Senate roll call votes as inputs.

I had formed the vague impression that the methodology was along the lines you state. My reaction, though, was that my impression must be wrong, because no such study could tell you that Clinton was the 11th most liberal (or the anythingth most liberal) Senator.

Instead, it just tells you how people voted alike. The analysis apparently proceeds with complete disregard for the content of the bills being voted on.

So, to take the single example most often mentioned on DU, how does it assess the votes on the Iraq War Resolution? A lot of Democrats voted for it and Ron Paul voted against it.

Another example: A few years ago, the House voted on a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would have protected LGB but not T people. (Barney Frank caught hell from many of his usual allies for abandoning transgender rights, and he wrote a spirited defense of the strategy of get what you can now and come back for more later.) Most of the Republicans voted Nay because they opposed gay rights, of course. Some of the most liberal Democrats also voted Nay because of the exclusion of transpeople from the bill's protection. A methodology that lumps these two groups together may have utility for other purposes, but it can't be considered a reliable guide to who's liberal.

(As a side note, I discover from looking at my preceding paragraph that the DU spellchecker red-flags "transpeople". Admins, get on the ball!)

I voted for him in the '08 Primary because it was down to him & Hill, & I thought he was slightly more to the left. The accuracy of my judgment on that issue is debatable.

As for Hillary's liberalism, you really have to look at it issue by issue. Many people are liberal on social issues but allied with the Corporate Superstructure on financial, regulatory, energy, & international-relations issues.

For me, two large stumbling blocks in Hill's case were her hawkishness, as exemplified by her active politicking in support of invading Iraq, and her apparently cozy relationship with Wall Street.

Then there's TPP:

then you're not a liberal, full stop.

Getting the two most important issues 100% wrong while racking up "liberal points" on minor issues does not a liberal make.

She's also completely absent on other high-value liberal issues such as civil rights (silent on Ferguson, mass incarceration) and civil liberties (she's a big booster of the surveillance state).

If she's the "11th most liberal" then there are 10 or fewer actual liberals in the field.