Among the nonsense that’s sure to be bandied about in the election ahead is the absurd notion that John McCain is some sort of centrist. I’ve blogged about the emptiness of this claim before, but I wanted to highlight Paul Krugman’s take on the subject.

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.