In reporting on who will replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in Tuesday’s Washington Post, reporter Keith Richburg unspooled a weird sentence about someone being a conservative Democrat. "There is also pressure to replace Clinton with a woman; one name being mentioned is Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Blue Dog Democrat from Albany."
Gillibrand may be an up-and-coming talent and may have joined the Blue Dog Democrats, but she cannot be described as "conservative" based on her first year of votes in the House. For her 2007 votes, the American Conservative Union gave her a single-digit score of eight and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action classified her as a nearly perfect 95 percent liberal.
At the liberal Daily Beast website, Benjamin Sarlin takes this false advertising to an extreme, calling Gillibrand the 95-percent liberal a "bizarro version of Sarah Palin." She has been graded with an A by the National Rifle Association. But Gillibrand, who identifies herself as a Catholic, was also endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice New York, which praised her as a legislator who "demonstrated a passionate commitment to our cause and the kind of impressive leadership our movement needs in Washington."
