Ignoring its own interview with Sen. Barack Obama in which he criticized the National Journal study, the Politico uncritically reported Sen. John McCain's claim that Obama has the “most liberal voting record in the Senate.” In the June 4 article, Politico senior political writer Jonathan Martin, analyzing McCain's June 3 speech in New Orleans, reported: " 'In just a few years in office, Sen. Obama has accumulated the most liberal voting record in the Senate,' McCain said, citing a National Journey [sic] survey that Republicans have already enthusiastically seized upon."

Martin cited no criticism of the study, not even Obama's in an interview with Politico. During a February 11 Politico/WJLA-TV interview, Obama responded to a question by Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris about the Journal's 2007 vote ratings, saying, "[A]n example of why I was rated the most liberal was because I wanted an office of public integrity that stood outside of the Senate, and outside of Congress, to make sure that you've got an impartial eye on ethics problems inside of Congress. Now, I didn't know that it was a liberal or Democratic issue. I thought that was a good government issue that a lot of Republicans would like to see."

Indeed, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, the National Journal based its rankings, not on all votes cast by senators in 2007, but on "99 key Senate votes selected by National Journal reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale." In contrast, 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 10th most liberal senator.

Media Matters has previously noted that Harris and Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei subsequently misrepresented Obama's statement from the February 11 interview. In a March 18 article, Harris and VandeHei reported that "[w]hen pressed on a voting record that the National Journal called the most liberal in the Senate, Obama dismissed ideological labels as 'old politics,' " but they did not report Obama's initial response criticizing the Journal's methodology. Obama referred to “old politics” moments later, when Harris asked Obama whether he is “comfortable with the liberal label.”

In addition, Media Matters has noted that, in an April 28 article, Politico staff writer Josh Kraushaar uncritically reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee aired an ad in Mississippi's 1st District which “refer[ed] to Obama's ranking by National Journal as having 'the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.' ”

From the June 4 Politico article:

McCain accused Obama of blocking progress in Iraq and for advocating for a series of big government solutions to the country's domestic problems that were better left discarded in an earlier era.

“In just a few years in office, Sen. Obama has accumulated the most liberal voting record in the Senate,” McCain said, citing a National Journey survey [sic] that Republicans have already enthusiastically seized upon. “But the old, tired, big government policies he seeks to dust off and call new won't work in a world that has changed dramatically since they were last tried and failed.”