Tom DeLay thinks he's a Marxist (if only mewls my subscription to New Left Review), McCain isn't sure he's not a socialist, and everyone else in America agrees Obama's a partisan liberal Democrat despite his sentimental post-partisan effluvium. The evidence for this assessment rests heavily on an elaborate ranking system devised by the magazine National Journal — sort of the Zagat for congressional voting (Barbara Boxer's "romantic" yea for this "controversial" resolution to "carve up" Iraq makes her a "fire-breathing elitist gorgon.") It named Obama the "Most Liberal Senator" in 2007. Except that its methodology is cracked, according to Josh Patashnik at the New Republic. For one thing, a decisive factor in the magazine's evaluation is how many votes a lawmaker has missed, and Obama's actually not been truant enough: