Obama’s the “most liberal” senator but don’t tell anyone

National Journal reports:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator. ...

The rest of the NJ story’s here.

You can’t open a newspaper these days without seeing something about whether Sen. McCain “is conservative enough for Republicans.” And there are all those “Gov. Romney needs to excite conservative voters” stories.

There've even been stories comparing the percentages of votes each candidate got in Florida among voters self-ID'ing as “conservative” and “very conservative.”

But how’s Sen. Obama doing compared to his fellow liberal, Sen. Clinton, among voters self-ID'ing as “liberal” and “very liberal?”

I don’t know. I haven’t read anything about that. How about you?

After Sen. Ted Kennedy, “the liberal lion,” roared his endorsement of Obama, there were scads of stories in the Democratic-dominated MSM about the help Kennedy’s endorsement would be to Obama among Hispanic and union member voters.

But I can’t recall any stories about the effect of Kennedy’s endorsement among “liberal” and “very liberal” voters, two groups Ted Kennedy "excites."

I posted the other day concerning the reluctance of most liberal Democrats and their media flacks to call liberals “liberal.” Many of them even cried “smear” during the ’04 presidential campaign when Republicans correctly called Sen. John Kerry "a liberal." ( Who thinks "liberal" is a smear? )

But it’s no more a smear to call a liberal “a liberal” than it is to call a conservative “a conservative.”

The country’s had an awful lot of MSM puff-piece stories about Obama’s “message of change.” It’s time for some solid reporting on his liberal voting record.