John McCain said in a Thursday interview with the Kansas City Star that Barack Obama is politically to the left of Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Presumably McCain was referring to the National Journal rankings, which named Obama the most liberal senator based upon his sporadic votes—he missed 35% of them—in 2007.

Even the National Journal, which in previous years had placed Obama considerably lower on the liberality scale, proffered the ranking with caveats; neutral analysts and ones to the left of John Birch dismissed it completely, and with good cause: In 2006, Obama voted the Bush administration position 49% of the time, and in 2007, the year of the socialist Obama, the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee voted the Bush administration position 40% of the time.

The most polite description of the designation is “total crap.” As we’ve noted before, Obama’s positions on important social issues are similar to, and in some cases to the right of, Richard Nixon’s. The health care plan proposed by Nixon to head off Ted Kennedy’s universal health care proposals in the early 1970s is quite similar to what Obama proposes nearly 40 years later. Nixon proposed a guaranteed income in 1968 that would deliver somewhere between $9,000 and $15,000 in 2007 dollars, depending upon how one calculates these things; Obama wouldn’t even contemplete such a thing. Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971; can anyone seriously imagine Obama doing the same absent an apocalyptic inflationary crisis?

On national security and defense issues, Obama has consistently voted with the hawks of both parties to continue funding the occupation of Iraq. His plan to end the occupation doesn’t include an actual end to the occupation, and is similar to Nixon’s intention to maintain a US presence in Vietnam after a substantial troop drawdown. Although Obama has criticized former rival Hillary Clinton for voting to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, he sponsored a nearly identical bill last year. His vote for the new FISA legislation providing corporate immunity from FISA-related lawsuits and vastly expanding the government’s authority to spy on US citizens dovetails exactly with the White House position and concedes Nixon’s assertion that the president is above the law.

So we find that Obama and Nixon share common ground on some issues, while on at least one other Obama lands to Nixon’s right. If Obama is, as McCain barely avoid saying, a socialist, Nixon must have been at least a Trotskyist if not a die-hard Marxist. Yet the Kansas City newspaper blithely transmitted McCain’s assertion regarding Obama’s liberalism without making any effort to verify or challenge it. Even granting the press’s lack of institutional memory—who could conceive the radical notion of comparing Obama’s positions to those held by presidents in relatively recent memory?—the paper’s blend of credulity and journalistic laziness is inexcusable.

Inexcusable press behavior is de rigueur in the modern world, but one would think that designating Obama a socialist would automatically prompt, not beg, the question of whether or not he is one. At least the recent and absurd furor over the New Yorker cover satirizing right-wing invocations of Michelle Obama’s “terrorist fist bump” and Barack’s (non-observant) Muslim father had reporters asking whether or not the cartoon was in fact beyond the pale.

But no: the role of newspapers today is akin to a sewage treatment plant, only absent that tiresome “treatment” business. By that standard, the Kansas City Star is a star.

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