Reflecting on Glenn Reynolds' happy reaction to the news of the Robert Gates appointment, ("I'm beginning to feel like I won this election!"), John Hawkins takes issue with the emergent view of Barack Obama as a centrist:

Obama is not a centrist and he's not filling his cabinet up with them either. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the overwhelming majority of staffers Obama is bringing on are hard core liberals. The Kos crowd may not always look at it like that, but the netroots think anyone who doesn't want to prosecute Bush for war crimes or deliberately lose the war in Iraq is practically a Republican.

Activists on the far left (who call themselves "progressives) are not "liberal" by any stretch of the imagination, although they get lumped together with liberals by simplistic phraseology. The Berkeley political "spectrum" is so skewed to the left that city elections pit McGovern Democrats ("the right") against Marxist activists ("the left"). McGovern Democrats in Berkeley are so used to being seen as "conservatives," or "the right" that they just take it in stride, and this leads the Marxists to imagine that they really are doing battle with right wing reactionaries.

A similar process occurs on the right -- and as I've often pointed out, to many rightists today, Barry Goldwater would a liberal. (Similarly, I've asked whether not agreeing with the Family Research Council is the new definition of RINO....)

The far reaches of the left and the right are so much louder than everyone else that the debate becomes distorted, leading many to believe that the "choice" is between the far left and the far right.

Activists on both sides like it that way, because they want the playing field to themselves.

MORE: I'm wondering what sort of outcry there might have been had McCain been elected and started behaving in a similar manner (by, say, appointing country club Republican centrists and Lieberman liberals).

Sure, he'd be getting a fierce scolding from the WorldNetDaily right.

But would he be getting any credit from the left?

Obviously, what he'd get from the "progressive" left would be the usual cries for impeachment and war crimes tribunals. As to the mainstream media left, I wonder. I think the only credit he'd be likely to get would be from an occasional liberal blogger with integrity.

(Fortunately, there's no way to keep bloggers off the playing field....)