On July 15, FOX News Channel senior business correspondent Terry Keenan responded to a question from Your World w/ Neil Cavuto anchor Neil Cavuto about Wall Street's “consensus view” on whether or not Vice President Dick Cheney should stay on the Republican ticket, by asserting that Martha Stewart would be preferable to the “most liberal ticket” since George McGovern.

From the July 15 edition of FOX News Channel's Your World w/ Neil Cavuto:

KEENAN: In terms of Cheney? I think they'd [Wall Street] be happy to have Martha Stewart on the ticket if it meant John Kerry wasn't gonna become the next president, because, I mean, this Kerry-Edwards ticket is the most liberal ticket since John [sic] McGovern ran in 1972.

Stewart, who was found guilty of lying to investigators about a 2001 stock sale, was scheduled for sentencing the following day (July 16).

Keenan's claim that Kerry-Edwards '04 is “the most liberal ticket since” George McGovern ran in 1972 echoed the frequent misrepresentations by conservatives of National Journal's liberal rankings for 2003. While National Journal's 2003 annual ratings placed Kerry as the first most liberal senator and Edwards as the fourth, those ratings were based on only 40 of Edwards's Senate votes and only 25 of Kerry's Senate votes. And as National Journal congressional reporter Richard E. Cohen pointed out in a July 9 article (NationalJournal.com subscription required), “Ten other current senators have a lifetime composite liberal score that is higher than Kerry's. Meanwhile, Edwards, who first joined the Senate in 1999, has a lifetime composite liberal score of 75.7, a number that puts him in the moderate wing of his party.”