(Bumped at 5:00 pm eastern - promoted by Chris Bowers)
When it comes to discussions of the Democratic presidential primary, it is fairly common practice within the blogosphere to debate which candidate is the most "progressive." These debates often include analyses of voting records, staff hires, policy positions, candidate backgrounds, stump speech rhetoric, sponsored legislation, and Iraq war votes / apologies. Depending on who you ask and which criteria you value the most, pretty much all of the Democratic 2008ers (except, I think, for Biden) have, at one time or another, been identified as either "the most progressive" or "true progressive" candidate in the campaign by multiple bloggers. The varying answers individuals arrive at speaks simultaneously to the fairly nebulous meaning of a term as widespread as "progressive," to the difficulty in assigning quantifiable ideological rankings to individuals, and to the always gaseous nature of national political campaigns.
Given this, for a moment let's put aside attempts by progressive activists to define Democratic candidates as progressive or otherwise, and instead take a look at how often the eight Democrats currently running for President define themselves as progressive. Let's call these the "self-identified" progressive rankings. According to a Google search I conducted a few days ago, here are the number of results for the word "progressive" on all of the candidate's campaign websites, along with some notes on the findings for each:
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