Observers skeptical of political score cards

AUGUSTA – Every year, dozens of interest groups rate how they think members of Congress are doing, and one of the first of this season’s score cards is out.

U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a Washington-based organization founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, says it has used up to 20 votes in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate to rate the four members of Maine’s delegation. It gives Democrat Rep. Tom Allen its highest percentage score.

Some of Maine’s political observers are skeptical of the impact such ratings have, but the groups that do the measuring suggest such rankings make members of Congress more accountable.

Others that publicize their ratings include such organizations as Citizens Against Government Waste and the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

PIRG said this week it used 20 votes in the House, ranging from votes on amendments to the Clean Air Act AND campaign finance reform, to rate the 435 voting House members. To rate the 100 senators, the group used 18 votes ranging from several environmental bills to decisions on creating a patient’s bill of rights.

For the record, Allen had the highest 2001 rating by PIRG, which said he voted “in the public interest” 85 percent of the time. Democrat Rep. John Baldacci had a 75 percent rating. Both of Maine’s Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, received 56 percent ratings by the group.

But do the ratings by PIRG, or other groups, have any effect on the lawmakers or the voters?

“We think we can have an impact in making members of Congress more accountable to the public,” said Amy Thompson, executive director of the Maine branch of U.S. PIRG. “We plan to be going door to door this summer and distributing 30,000 of these rating cards as part of our effort to educate the public about Congress.”

Most of the issues used by PIRG to rate members of Congress are environmental votes taken in both the House and Senate. Thompson said the door-to-door effort in Maine is aimed at building support among voters for issues PIRG believes have become dominated by “special interests” and need grass-roots efforts by her organization as a counterweight.

But one former lawmaker doubts such rankings have much impact.

“I think that most people think these ratings are not worth a damn,” said David Emery, who served as a Republican member of Congress from 1974 to 1982. “Ratings like these may have some influence with a group’s own members, but not with the general public.”

Emery said he was not singling out PIRG for his criticism. He said many groups issued ratings while he served in Congress and that he never felt they had any impact on how he voted or on the voters at the polls.

Barry Hobbins of Saco, who served in the state Legislature, was Democratic Party chairman, and was his party’s nominee for Congress in the 1st Congressional District in 1984, saw some advantages. “In a primary, if a group like the [labor organization] AFL-CIO does a rating, they can have some impact,” Hobbins said. “But the group has to have a base, a lot of members, to even then have much of an impact.”

Amy Fried, who teaches political science at the University of Maine, stopped short of saying the ratings are totally useless. But, she said, any impact on voters is “marginal” at best.

“The ratings do help, to some extent, in educating the public about where a member of Congress stands on an issue,” she said. “It is very difficult for the average member of the public to get the information on how a member of Congress has voted on a particular issue, so the ratings may be of some help to some people.”

Fried said the ratings also can be used by the groups to run advertisements independent of candidates to try to have an impact on an election. She said those efforts have had mixed results.

“We saw some of that in the last presidential campaign with the Sierra Club running ads on the [George W.] Bush environmental record in Texas,” she said. “Possibly those ads had some impact, but there is controversy over how much impact advertising has on voters.”