Spurred by a comment by Mark Penn about the lack of coverage of Barack Obama’s attendance in the Senate, I dug into Obama ‘s voting history.

GovTrack.com says Obama has missed 268 of 1240 votes (22%) since Jan 6, 2005, which they rank as “Exceedingly Poor relative to peers.” I’ll give Obama a smidgen of credit in that almost all of that is in the past two years — 43 percent of the votes since January 2007. In the 109th Congress, Obama missed only 11 out of 645 votes. On the other hand, that still ranked him 47th out of 100 senators.

No word on how many times he voted “present,” as he did in the state legislature 130 times.

McCain, going back to 1993, is also ranked as “Exceedingly Poor relative to peers”; this counts not one but two presidential campains, obviously. GovTrack does not go back to the beginning of his congressional career.

Having said that, one could argue in a 25-year legislative career, it seems likely that McCain has voted on every topic under the sun several times over.