Will our “polarizing” president attract more voters than he repels?

Jan 30, 2012
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO

Barack Obama is, according to the headline of a Pete Wehner post at Commentary, “The Most Polarizing President Ever.” Over at the Washington Post, Chris Cilizza and Aaron Blake‘s headline disagrees with Wehner only on what part of speech “ever” is: “Obama: The Most Polarizing President. Ever.” (We couldn’t find the interjectional ever in a dictionary, but we gather it is more emphatic than the old adverbial form.)

Wehner notes that “one of the core claims” of Obama’s 2008 campaign was that he would “heal the nation’s political breach . . . elevate the national debate . . . do away with what he called the ’50 plus one’ style of governing . . . ‘turn the page’ on the ‘old politics’ of division and anger . . . end a politics that ‘breeds division and conflict and cynicism’ . . . help us to ‘rediscover our bonds to each other and … get out of this constant petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics’ . . . ‘cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past.’ ”

Wehner argues that Obama has failed to deliver on these promises. Gee, ya think?

Cilizza and Blake look at the same Gallup poll findings and try to let Obama off the hook:

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.

In this telling, which is not unpersuasive, Obama is more a creature of his time than a creator of it. He didn’t polarize the country, and it is beyond his capacity to lessen its polarization significantly. Yet even if we stipulate that his promise was impossible to fulfill, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for his failure to fulfill it. He made either a promise he knew would be impossible to keep, which would be dishonest, or one he naively believed he had the ability to keep, which would be foolish. (Somehow this argument reminds us of the trilemma, C.S. Lewis’s argument for the divinity of Jesus. It does not lead us to a similar conclusion about Obama.)

Cilizza and Blake define polarization as follows: “We are simply living in an era in which Democrats dislike a Republican president (and Republicans dislike a Democratic one) even before the commander in chief has taken a single official action.” But the metaphor of polarization, in which the parties are magnetic fields, is actually a good deal more complicated than that. Magnetic fields, after all, affect different substances differently.

For one thing, magnetism is both an attractive and a repulsive force. Cilizza and Blake emphasize the latter, but polarization requires both. One Gallup chart ranks presidents from Eisenhower to Obama on polarization during their third year in office. Obama is at the very top, with a 68-point “party gap.” The three least polarized presidents were Jimmy Carter in 1979, Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and Ike in 1955. Carter was very unpopular (24% approval among Republicans, 46% among Democrats), Ike was very popular (91% and 57%), and LBJ’s popularity was middling (34% and 68%).

In a polarized electorate, then, partisans not only are more likely to disapprove of a president of the other party but also to approve of one from their own party. Cilizza and Blake note that “out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven–yes, seven–have come since 2004. [George W.] Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.” What they don’t note is that polarization declined significantly in 2008 (to a 61-point gap), when even Republicans had started to turn against Bush.

Why would the electorate be more polarized today than in past decades? Because there are far more, and sharper, ideological disputes than there used to be, and because both parties have become increasingly ideological. The Gallup data begin in the 1950s, a moment of broad though temporary stability. The big political disputes over the New Deal and internationalism versus isolationism were largely settled. A reckoning on civil rights, though long overdue, had only gotten under way. And today’s most polarizing “social issues,” like abortion and gay rights, were practically unheard of.

By the 1970s and ’80s the country had become more ideologically polarized. But partisan identification took a while to catch up. So, for example, Reagan was less “polarizing” than Bush fils or Obama because he had the support of the “Reagan Democrats,” who still identified with the donks even though they were closer to the GOP in ideology. A lot of Reagan Democrats (or their descendants) are now Republicans. Similarly, the socially liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” of yesterday are the socially liberal Democrats of today.

“The realization of that hyper-partisan reality has been slow in coming for Obama,” write Cilizza and Blake. “But in recent months, he seems to have turned a rhetorical corner–taking the fight to Republicans (and Republicans in Congress, particularly) and all but daring them to call his bluff.”

That’s a highly implausible account. After all, during the first half of his term, when Obama had big Democratic majorities in Congress, he and they governed in a hyperpartisan way. Their two biggest legislative initiatives, the “stimulus” and ObamaCare, were enacted with a grand total of three GOP votes.

The trouble with all this talk of “polarization” is that it ignores the large share of voters who are neither Democrats nor Republicans. Just as magnetic fields have no significant effect on copper or aluminum, many voters are unmoved by the push and pull of ideological polarization. These voters–broadly speaking, those who describe themselves as independents–increasingly decide our elections.

Obama isn’t a lame duck, at least not yet.

It is to them that Obama meant to appeal with his impossible promises to transcend partisan division. According to exit polls, independents made up 29% of the electorate in 2008, and Obama carried their votes, 52% to 44%, very close to his overall margin over John McCain. Obama’s airy promises of postpartisanship no doubt helped him win over independents, but our guess is that an even bigger factor was the sense from the preceding few years that Republicans were incapable of governing competently.

Obama has had low approval ratings among independents for most of his presidency. That, not “polarization,” is the reason he is in danger of defeat this year. The way for a Republican to beat him is to run a campaign centered on competence, not ideology.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204652904577193102267937214.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

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