GOP scours Obama votes for election ammunition

Sen. Barack Obama’s short voting record in the upper chamber includes a number of controversial votes likely to surface in national GOP attack ads aimed at taking down the surging Democratic candidate.

Republican researchers are poring over the Illinois Democrat’s three-year Senate voting record, looking for fresh fodder to be used should Obama become the Democratic Party’s nominee.

{mosads}Obama has done his best to highlight the times he’s reached across the aisle. But his positions on guns, gay marriage, abortion and border security could fire up conservatives and allow the GOP to attempt to blunt his campaign of bipartisanship.

The GOP attack strategy highlights the difficulties facing senators who seek the presidency. Senators’ votes are often based on an array of procedural and substantive considerations, and their precise motivations are not easily discernible. But they can easily be distorted on the campaign trail, a situation that dogged Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) leading up to his failed presidential bid in 2004.

“I don’t think senators make good candidates,” former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who now backs the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said in a 2005 interview. “If you’re in the Senate for 10 or 15 years, there’s a good chance you’ve been on both sides of every issue.”

Obama has served in the Senate only since 2005, and Republicans contend his votes already have provided them with ample ammunition.

“Obama’s record is as liberal as it is thin,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman at the Republican National Committee. “Given how brief his time in the U.S. Senate is, it’s really surprising how many bad votes he’s managed to accumulate.”

His supporters dismiss that characterization, pointing to Obama’s record of moving to expand healthcare to children, protect civil liberties, make vehicles more fuel-efficient, clamp down on improper lobbying in Washington and provide for a compassionate solution for the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants.

A campaign spokeswoman said evidence of Obama’s broad reach is found in the support he’s received from independent voters and even Republicans in primary states.

“Barack Obama’s record has been guided by principle and he has consistently shown the ability to reach across party lines to accomplish big changes,” said Jen Psaki, a campaign spokeswoman. “That is exactly the kind of president he would be.”
Before that happens, his voting record will be carefully scrutinized.

While seeking the nomination, Obama has moved slightly to the left. In 2006, the National Journal ranked Obama the 10th most liberal senator with an 86 percent rating, and the magazine said in 2005 he voted with liberal causes 83 percent of the time.

In 2007, Obama voted with his party nearly 97 percent of the time, almost 10 percentage points higher than the average for Senate Democrats, according to a Washington Post database. In the 109th Congress, which spans 2005 and 2006, Obama voted with Democrats 95 percent of the time, above the 87 percent average of Senate Democrats, the database says.

Despite the overall numbers, Obama highlights his ability to work across the aisle on big-ticket items. One of his most trumpeted items on the campaign trail was last year’s enactment of the ethics law, which makes legislative earmarks more transparent and imposes new restrictions on lobbying activities and gift-giving to members of Congress.

At the beginning of the 110th Congress, Obama reached out to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the chamber’s most conservative members, to narrowly keep an amendment alive that would provide greater transparency requirements on earmarks, a move that led to an embarrassing defeat for the new majority leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

With the Senate at the brink of a procedural meltdown over judicial nominations last Congress, Obama broke with the liberal Congressional Black Caucus and supported a compromise brokered by the so-called Gang of 14 senators, who agreed to limit the use of filibusters and move a handful of President Bush’s controversial nominees. McCain was a member of the Gang of 14, but Obama was not.

“This compromise recognizes that Republicans need to build some consensus around their judicial nominees and that Democrats need to be more judicious about their use of the filibuster,” Obama said in May 2005.

Obama later voted to cut off a filibuster on the conservative nominee Priscilla Owen, but voted against the nomination. She was later confirmed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Obama went against that principle in 2007, when he voted both to sustain a filibuster and against the nomination of the conservative Leslie Southwick to the same court.

Obama has broken ranks on other high-profile Democratic issues. One of his first votes as a senator in 2005 was to curtail the ability of plaintiffs to file class action lawsuits against corporations, a move strongly opposed by the trial bar and Democratic leaders.

The senator also voted for revisions to the 2006 Patriot Act and a 2005 energy package with tax breaks for oil and gas companies, two issues that have been targeted by his chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Despite those actions, a number of other votes could become GOP attack ads on the campaign trail if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee.

The senator has opposed expanding access to oil offshore and in Alaska, a slew of conservative judicial nominees including Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts, the elimination of the estate tax, a prohibition on civil suits against gun manufacturers, a fence along the Southwest border and unfettered funding for the Iraq war. Republicans will likely resurrect themes of gay marriage and abortion, by pointing to his 2006 vote against a constitutional amendment outlawing homosexual nuptials and against a 2006 measure to make it a crime to take a minor across state lines to have an abortion.

He also supported a fiscal 2008 budget resolution that assumed that some of Bush’s tax cuts would expire, a measure Democrats said was fiscally responsible but Republicans said would amount to the “biggest tax increase in history.”

Also, Obama and 81 other senators opposed an amendment in 2005 to strike the infamous $231 million “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark for Alaska and redirect that funding to help with rebuilding New Orleans.

The Senate rarely backs efforts to strike another member’s pet projects.

If Obama faces McCain in a general election, he may be hit over the earmarks issue. Unlike McCain, Obama voted with most of Congress for the 2005 highway bill, which included an eye-popping 6,000 earmarks worth more than $24 billion.