Well, let’s say that’s true in a relative sense: relative to the recently-prevailing political climate.

But on many issues Richard Nixon was to the left of Obama or Clinton, and McGovern was well to the left of that.

Saying someone is really liberal doesn’t mean he’s “far left,” any more than a conservative favors the torture, perpetual war, loss of civil liberties and fiscal insanity which has come to characterize this administration.

Just as there are lots of views on the Right which often get elided in mainstream discourse, there are also many voices on the Left which basically are limited to small grassroots groups and never show up in big-stakes politics.

Of course, I understand that in the Paleo world even Bush is a leftist, but that’s a redefinition by partisan agenda, not by actual politics. Bush ran as a conservative, and was embraced as the embodiment of conservativism almost unanimously until his poll numbers began to suffer rejection by the mainstream. Maybe you and a few others dissented, and that’s to your credit, but that doesn’t mean anyone to the left of Bush is a “far leftist”. One could use the same logic to say that anyone to the right of Bush is a “right-wing extremist”. The problem here is that makes Bill Clinton a right wing extremist, since he is cleary to the “right” of Bush on both economic and foreign policy issues.

There’s not a single policy of Obama’s (that I can think of) which is outside the general mainstream of liberal views. The “ratings” you mention are not a measure of extremism, but of “purity”. In other words, Obama’s ratings are a sign of his being a fairly pure liberal, not of his adhering to “far left views”. There are no “far left” measures being voted on in the Senate these days, so there’s no way to measure whether Obama agrees with any “far left” proposals. If far left measures get out put to a vote, then we will be able to see if Obama is “far left”, but since none get that far, and Obama himself has not proposed any, it’s rather absurd to claim that he’s a far left ideologue. It’s just a phony talking point that obscures Obama’s mainstream liberal agenda with charges of “extremism”. One would have to point to a collection of far-left policy proposals to make such charges stick, rather than merely point to a “rating” based on Senate votes.

One other point: Bush’s election in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative) was supposedly a leftward lurch by the Republicans at the time (and he lost the popular vote). It was 9/11 that distorted the whole “left-right” agenda, and allowed Bush to be re-elected. In general, I think the electorate has moved to the left, as evidenced by the strength of Obama and Hillary in national polls, and also by the sheer presence of McCain on the Republican ticket. This is a guy who was almost a Democrat a few years ago. In general, the long-term historical trend is an ongoing leftward drift of American politics, regardless of what rightward “corrections” seem to occur from time to time. This is even an international phenomena of human politics altogether. The whole world continues to move “left” in the general sense of favoring collective policy through the intermediary of government. It doesn’t go to the “far left” extreme of socialism or communism, but it does go towards the “mainstream” left of social democracy. Attempts to paint politiicians like Obama as “far left”, out of the mainstream, and “radicals” is simply reactionary nonsense. Yes, compared to the politics of the 1890′s, Obama is a far leftist. But so is McCain. In the politics of 2008, Obama is pretty near the center of what people want, which is why he polls even or ahead in national polls.