Dueling "conservative ratings" for Congressman Walter Jones | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Listening to the dueling ads on the airwaves, voters may wonder why some ads cite a rating claiming Walter Jones is a liberal Republican and others cite ratings that he is one of the most conservative. The difference comes from who is doing the rating. Some ratings are done by conservative organizations and others by elements of the liberal media. Conservative groups use issues that matter to actual conservatives, while liberal journalists tend to use issue that seem to them to be important.

    Take, for example, the ad that Walter Jones is running where Dot Helms, widow of revered conservative Senator Jesse Helms, states that Walter Jones was named the most conservative member of North Carolina's Congressional delegation. That ranking comes from FreedomWorks, a leading conservative organization, aligned with the Tea Party, which is working to elect conservative candidates around the country. During the campaign, another well established conservative organization that has been rating Congress for decades, the American Conservative Union, released its rating, in which Walter Jones ranked in its most conservative segment of the Congress. That one does not seem to have been used in ads yet.

    Then there is the ad from challenger Taylor Griffin that says Walter Jones has been named the most liberal Republican in Congress. That comes from a rating by a magazine known as the National Journal. The National Journal is part of Atlantic Media, the flagship publication of which, The Atlantic, is an avowedly liberal publication. The National Journal, however, tries to posture itself as more centrist. Most significantly this is a rating by journalists, not conservative activists, so they often tend to look at different issues that may not resonate with conservatives out in the trenches.
Walter jones speaking to his constituents in the 3rd Congressional district: Above.     photo by Stan Deatherage
    Similarly, a rating that contends that Walter Jones voted most often with President Obama does not come from any bona fide conservative group, but from liberal journalists. This area can be particularly subjective, since Obama does not vote in Congress himself nor does he often formally take an open stand on legislation. On those high profile issues where Obama has clearly taken a stand to urge Congress to vote a particular way like the debt ceiling, continuing budget resolutions, the ''stimulus'', and Obamacare, Walter Jones has consistently voted against Obama's position.

    There are also third party ads out, run in a media buy well into six figures, from Wall Street insider Joe Ricketts using the name ''Ending Spending'' which make a major point that Walter Jones voted three times against ''Paul Ryan's balanced budgets'', implying that Jones must have been soft on spending. In fact, the Paul Ryan budgets, and especially the last compromise with Senator Patty Murray, have been considered by many conservatives to not do enough to halt deficit spending. As a result, the conservative House Republican Study Committee has offered rival budgets which do much more than the Ryan budgets to get spending under control. The fiercest budget hawks have generally voted against the Ryan budgets, not because they spent too little, but because they spent too much. The Joe Ricketts ads are very dishonest in misrepresenting why Jones voted against the Ryan budgets. In fact, the major conservative blog RedState.com named Walter Jones as one of only ten members of what they called the ''Conservative Fight Club'', Congressmen who were willing to go to the mat, not only with the Democrats, but also with their own GOP leadership, to fight to cut spending and debt.

    Probably the most dishonest part of those Joe Ricketts ads, though, is where he claims that Walter Jones voted for ''trillions of dollars in debt''. The facts are that Walter Jones has voted against every single debt limit increase since he has been in Congress.

    In addition to multi-issue ratings of Congressmen, there are also single issue groups that produce ratings, such as the National Rifle Association which gave Walter Jones an A+ on gun rights issues, National Right to Life, which gave Walter Jones a score of 100 on right to life issues, and Numbers USA, which gave Walter Jones an A+ on fighting illegal immigration. Some of these groups use a numerical scale and others a letter scale.

    There is an old saying that you can prove anything with statistics, and these days the same seems to be true with Congressional ratings as well. It is necessary to look at who it is that is producing the particular rating.