This article from the January 13 Congressional Quarterly might have been cited before, but I thought I would link it for anyone unaware of it. I thought it was an interesting analysis.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=weeklyreport-000002654703An excerpt:
In truth, however, judging by their Senate records, voters could pick either one of them and get more or less the same package. Clinton and Obama may spend the next three weeks before the Super Tuesday primaries yelling about their differences from one another — and looking for any scrap of evidence that they’re the more genuine agent of change — but the reality is that their Senate careers have been more similar than their campaigns would ever admit.
For one thing, their voting records are nearly indistinguishable. Although both have good working relationships with Republicans, Congressional Quarterly’s annual vote studies show that Clinton and Obama both had strongly partisan voting records last year. In fact, both of them joined their fellow Democrats in mostly party-line roll calls more often than their own majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. In the past year, Clinton voted with her party on 98 percent of the questions that pitted a majority of Democrats against a majority of Republicans, while Obama’s score was 97 percent. Reid sided with his party on only 95 percent of those votes.
There was a somewhat bigger difference in the two candidates’ support of President Bush’s policies — a difference that could matter to Democratic voters who want a complete change from the Bush presidency. Clinton voted in support of Bush’s stated positions only 35 percent of the time, while Obama did so 40 percent of the time.
Even there, though, the main reason for Obama’s score was not that he voted with Bush more often than Clinton did, but that he missed several of the votes where Clinton showed up to cast her ballot against Bush’s priorities. But still, both candidates opposed Bush more often than the average for Senate Democrats.
Votes aren’t the only measure of a senator’s work, of course, and they’re hardly the only indication of whether a senator has really tried to change Washington. A risky move, a bold legislative proposal, an action that helped to defuse a big partisan fight, a brokered deal that got a stalled bill moving again — any of these things could qualify as a bid to “move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington,” as Obama defined the challenge in his speech the night he won the Iowa caucuses.
Yet neither Clinton nor Obama has compiled a lengthy track record on any of those measures. Both have some successes they can point to: Obama can claim credit for being a central player, along with Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, in the enactment of last year’s lobbying and ethics law; Clinton’s intervention at key points helped pave the way for the creation in 1997 of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP — but that was when she was first lady, not a senator. In both cases, the victories were more the exception than evidence of a pattern of shaking up the system.
“There’s really nothing that suggests that kind of thing in the record of either candidate,” said Michael L. Mezey, a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
There is one major disagreement that isn’t reflected in their Senate records: Clinton voted to authorize the Iraq War in 2002, while Obama spoke out against it. Obama has won strong support from anti-war Democrats because of that difference, but because he wasn’t in the Senate at the time, he wasn’t able to cast an official vote against the war. And since he has joined the Senate, his differences with Clinton have virtually disappeared as the two have voted consistently for timetables to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.
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Fortunately for both Obama and Clinton, there may be an escape clause if anyone raises too many questions about their records. The key to claiming the mantle of change, as Obama has discovered and Clinton is now learning, may be to make the campaign as much about the voters as about themselves. Mezey, of DePaul University, recalls being inspired in his youth by John F. Kennedy — not because of Kennedy’s Senate record, which was lackluster, but because of the promise of generational change. Now, he says he sees the same excitement in his students as they listen to Obama’s lyrical speeches.
“The reason our campaign has always been different is because it’s not just about what I will do as president,” Obama said in New Hampshire. “It’s also about what you, the people who love this country, can do to change it.” If either Obama or Clinton rides the wave of change to the White House, however, the future won’t depend on what the voters can do. It will depend on what the new president can do.
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