Recently I worried that the news media would do again what they did in 2000, and somehow latch on to the storyline that a very conservative Republican and a progressive Democrat were really practically the same on the issues. And lo and behold, it’s starting (via dday).

As a numbers guy, I’m particularly upset that the piece contains this assertion:

With a Republican president experiencing some of the worst approval ratings ever, it’s no shock that the party opted for an unusually centrist candidate.

Look, there are ways to assess politicians’ position on the left-right scale. Ignore the National Journal, which has a somewhat subjective method, and always manages to find that the current Democratic candidate is an ultra-liberal. Instead, we can turn to the Poole-Rosenthal-McCarty analysis, which is based on a systematic, no fiddling technique using rollcall votes.

And they tell us that, based on his voting record, McCain is the eighth most conservative member of the current Senate. That’s right: he’s been voting on the right wing of the Republican party.

But has he just moved right to curry favor with the GOP base? No: he was the second most conservative member of the previous Senate.

Add: Barack Obama, by contrast, while more liberal than the average Democrat, is considerably closer to the center than McCain.