Rob writes:>Jim's plenty left for me. < thanks.
BTW, there was a recent effort to pin down the extremely vagud left/right metaphor by a couple of political scientists (I don't remember their names, but it was reported by SLATE magazine and by Paul Krugman). Their project was to draw a "map" in which U.S. senators who voted in similar ways were close together in space (the way Perth and Brisbane seem to be close together for those of us who've never been down under). Surprisingly, there are only two dimensions to their "map." "Up vs. down" in U.S. politics refers to civil rights issues, while "left" vs. "right" is about class and inequality. The former dimension has become less important over time, say these folks, but the latter still works. One of my senators (Barbara Boxer) ends up on the extreme left, which may say something about the limits of this research. More importantly to me, it seems that the meaning of "the middle" changes over time. JD
