Marshall insinuates National Journal bias

What is this elliptical comment from Josh Marshall supposed to mean?

[I]f John McCain would be the big winner of a result tonight that would insure a continued and hard fought Democratic primary race, you have to figure that a big loser would be the National Journal who would be faced with the possible need to re-re-jigger their congressional voting rankings to make Clinton the most liberal member of the United States Senate.

Politics is a rough biz.

Is he really suggesting that National Journal, which is about as non-partisan as any publication in Washington, is out to get the Democrats? On what basis? As far as we know, the problem isn't bias -- it's the lousy methodology that National Journal uses. As in 2004 with John Kerry, if you look at more sophisticated classification algorithms used by political scientists, Barack Obama is not the most liberal senator in the current Congress.

Unfortunately, this post is yet another example of Marshall suggesting what he can't prove.

Update 3/4 7:57 PM: A reader points out that Marshall may instead be implying that National Journal manipulates its rankings in an effort to generate PR, which is another plausible reading of the post. It's important to note that the editor of NJ directly denies that the magazine had any advance knowledge of what Obama's ranking would be when it picked the votes used to generate the ratings.

Comments

[lowellfield]

Is there a more humorless bore anywhere on the internet?

There's enough real, honest-to-God misinformation out there that we really don't need a traffic cop to blow his whistle every time a blogger asserts or suggests something that can't be proven in court.