This article in the New Yorker isn't good enough and too long to read in its entirety. It is basically another pro-bama echo chamber / in-kind campaign contribution. But this paragraph jumped out at me:

Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kPCBTIRH

Of course, where the New Yorker thinks the center is can be roughly guaged by this description:
Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree."

Norman Orstein is also a contributor to the NYT, and blogged for the HuffPo, which lists a brief bio: "Norman J. Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News. In addition, Ornstein writes for USA Today as a member of its Board of Contributors and writes a weekly column called "Congress Inside Out" for Roll Call newspaper. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and other major publications, and regularly appears on television programs like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. He serves as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission, working to ensure that our institutions of government can be maintained in the event of a terrorist attack on Washington; his efforts in this area are recounted in a profile of him in the June 2003 Atlantic Monthly. His campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the major law, known as McCain/Feingold, that reformed the campaign financing system. Legal Times referred to him as "a principal drafter of the law" and his role in its design and enactment was profiled in the February 2004 issue of Washington Lawyer."

And if Brookings can be called, "bipartisan" so can AEI for employing Ornstein. Mann's comments are clearly from the Left.

"From September 1st to Election Day, Obama outspent McCain by almost three to one, and, as many Republicans are quick to note, ran more negative ads than any Presidential candidate in modern history. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kPCBTIRH"

Why are "many Republicans quick to note" something that would be an indelable mark in the MSM were O not a fellow traveller?