October 20, 2010
Sen. Graham is highly rated by the ACU, but that doesn't make him conservative
The Ratings Game
by Jack Hunter


Attempting to demonstrate the Tea Party's extremism last week, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank asked, "Who's a Real Conservative?" comparing the American Conservative Union ratings of recently ousted Republicans like Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Bennett of Utah with past GOP leaders. When taken to task by Tea Partiers at a town hall meeting last spring, Sen. Lindsey Graham reminded the audience he had a lifetime ACU rating of 90.

During the 2008 GOP presidential primaries, John McCain would tout his 82 rating by the ACU, and yet most conservatives would put the senator in the same squishy category as Graham, a dishonor the Tea Party now extends to the likes of Republicans like Murkowski and Bennett. In 2008, the ACU listed Graham as one of only 20 "Senate Standouts," made up of the Senate's allegedly most conservative members. Mind you, Graham received this honor just one year after he helped spearhead amnesty for illegal aliens. When Graham attempted to cozy up to those concerned about illegal immigration in August by raising concerns about so-called "anchor baby" citizenship, the three-decade-long chairman of the ACU David Keene wasn't buying it, remarking "This is Lindsey Graham-standing."

Milbank, Graham, and others are now asking "What's wrong with the Tea Party?" Tea Partiers and apparently even Keene should be asking what's wrong with the ACU rating.

What Milbank, Graham, and others now consider Tea Party extremism is actually a long overdue reassessment of what it means to be a conservative. Using the ACU rating as his guide, Milbank writes: "I discovered that if conservatives were to employ the purity standards they applied to Murkowski and Bennett, they would have rejected many, if not most, of the leading Republican lawmakers of the past 40 years." Milbank is correct, but he ignores the larger fact that these Republican lawmakers haven't accomplished squat in the last 40 years. Conservative rhetoric has abounded. So has government. That the Tea Party might be waking up to this fact could be a new day in American politics, however dark it may seem for establishment Republicans long accustomed to camouflaging their big government records with political accoutrements like ACU ratings. To its credit, the Tea Party seems unmoved by how many times a politician has claimed to be pro-life, pro-gun, or pro-war so long as he's been pro-big government. Republicans love touting their ACU ratings. Tea Party members now tout their anti-TARP votes.

The shortfalls of the ACU ratings aren't peculiar to that organization. Other, similar ratings can be just as deceiving. For example, in 2009 the Chamber of Commerce released its congressional scorecard, which gave Rep. Ron Paul, arguably the most free-market member of Congress, the lowest ranking of any Republican. The Chamber also gave Sen. Jim DeMint, another solid free market champion, a similar low rating. According to the Chamber's 2009 rankings, Republicans Paul and DeMint are less pro-business than Democrats Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Why? Both Paul and DeMint did not vote for President Obama's nearly $800 billion stimulus, which allegedly was a "pro-business" bill, according to the Chamber.

During Kentucky's U.S. Senate Republican primary this year, candidate Trey Grayson tried to paint his opponent and eventual nominee Rand Paul as insufficiently pro-life because Paul believes in a states' rights solution to overturning Roe v. Wade instead of a federal solution. Grayson's ruse worked well for a time. How does the ACU's ratings system treat such discrepancies, where otherwise conservative Republicans might be penalized for simply holding an equally conservative, but sometimes opposite position of the GOP at large? For example, would Rand's preference for states' rights over federal solutions be considered a negative? After all, conservatives have long been strong supporters of the 10th amendment. Is this position any less pro-life? How about Republicans who refuse to support undeclared wars, which, by definition, are unconstitutional? Are these GOP champions of the Constitution, however small in numbers, being penalized as somehow less conservative?

Ranking standards that ignore these and other significant variances, which often call into question what actually is and isn't "conservative," raises questions about the validity of those standards. Simply put, would Rand Paul, as a senator, somehow be rated as less conservative than, say, Graham? Is DeMint actually less pro-business than Barack Obama?

Conservatives typically recognize their own, and no ratings system is going to fool most of them into believing that men like Graham or McCain have magically become part of the club. With the Tea Party criticizing once solidly conservative Republicans, we will likely be hearing even more about these ratings even though they essentially mean nothing.

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