Clinton and Obama Not Quite ‘Liberal’ to CBS’ Greenfield

How far left do you have to be to make the networks' progressive candidates dream team? CBS News Senior Political Correspondent Jeff Greenfield twice referred to Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as "relatively liberal senators" during a live interview on Washington, D.C.'s WTOP News this morning during drive time.

Discussing the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries, Greenfield first described Obama and Clinton as "both relatively liberal senators," and then later as "relatively liberal senators from blue states."

Given that both have widely-recognized liberal voting records, with the National Journal naming Obama as "the most liberal" member of the U.S. Senate -- even to the left of Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) -- one wonders what an actual "liberal" would look like to Mr. Greenfield. Would it be Raul Castro? Ted Turner? Who?

To be fair, Greenfield is less inclined than many of his colleagues to use one-sided labels, but nonetheless has had no problem at times describing certain Republicans as "conservatives." On February 5, 2008, according to MRC's CyberAlert:

The CBS News team managed to apply the "conservative" label at least 44 times -- in several instances beyond anything about the conservative split with McCain -- yet never once uttered the term "liberal" during a night when two liberals faced off on the Democratic side. Jeff Greenfield and Bob Schieffer each tagged the same Senator, 25 minutes apart, with Greenfield calling Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn the "most conservative Senator" and Schieffer referring to him as "very conservative."

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JEFF GREENFIELD, on McCain: He's got a whole lot of conservatives on his side, ranging from Jack Kemp, the Godfather of supply-side economics, to Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Senator, maybe the most conservative Senator on a lot of grounds....