"So Is It Fair to Say That Obama Is the Most Liberal President of the Past Half Century?"

"If you were to call him the most liberal president since LBJ, you'd be right. There's really not much question about it.
"But that's not because he's some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It's because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It's easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter's strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter's liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.
"Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal."


Kevin Drum at Mother Jones discusses relative political positions of recent Democrats.