How to check if all of the following items are in a list?

Operators like <= in Python are generally not overriden to mean something significantly different than "less than or equal to". It's unusual for the standard library does this--it smells like legacy API to me.

Use the equivalent and more clearly-named method, set.issubset. Note that you don't need to convert the argument to a set; it'll do that for you if needed.

set(['a', 'b']).issubset(['a', 'b', 'c'])

I like these two because they seem the most logical, the latter being shorter and probably fastest (shown here using set literal syntax which has been backported to Python 2.7):

all(x in {'a', 'b', 'c'} for x in ['a', 'b'])
#   or
{'a', 'b'}.issubset({'a', 'b', 'c'})

I would probably use set in the following manner :

set(l).issuperset(set(['a','b'])) 

or the other way round :

set(['a','b']).issubset(set(l)) 

I find it a bit more readable, but it may be over-kill. Sets are particularly useful to compute union/intersection/differences between collections, but it may not be the best option in this situation ...