Q&A #2: Obama the most liberal foreign senator?

Here is the second of my responses to election questions posted by readers.

Some whack job that I work with said that Obama was the most liberal senator and that he was born in Kenya. I know this is BS, but you can you write something about these false allegations? - Anonymous

I will start by answering the question related to citizenship. Barack was born in the State of Hawaii, which is part of the United States of America. Some bloggers tried to claim that his birth certificate was fake, but his birth certificate has been examined by factcheck.org and confirmed to be legitimate. This false allegation is just another smear designed to divert attention away from the issues and raise doubts about Obama. In truth, John McCain is the one who was born in a foreign country. Still, I think that McCain should be considered a natural born citizen, as he was born on a U.S. military base.

Now let's answer the other part of your question. I too have heard conservative pundits and republicans refer to Obama as the most liberal Senator. They often cite a flawed rating conducted by the National Journal as evidence. The National Journal's 2007 Vote Ratings, based its rankings not on all votes cast by senators in 2007, but on "99 key Senate votes" (out of 442 total votes). However, a study by political science professors Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis, using every non-unanimous vote cast in the Senate in 2007 to determine relative ideology, placed Obama in a tie for the ranking of 10th most liberal senator. Senator McCain was the 8th most conservative according to their study. For further information, I will refer you to Politifact.com for their report on this topic.