Washington Post: The most polarizing President - ever - & a response

UPDATE: Democrats jump swiftly to the President's defense; go here - It's all the Republicans fault

You know who. But as the article below says, it isn't just Obama's fault.

Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.

For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever. (The previous high was George W. Bush in 2007, when he had a 59 percent difference in job approval ratings.)

In 2010, the partisan gap between how Obama was viewed by Democrats versus Republicans stood at 68 percent; in 2009, it was 65 percent. Both were the highest marks ever for a president’s second and first years in office, respectively.

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

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“Obama’s ratings have been consistently among the most polarized for a president in the last 60 years,” concludes Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones in a memo summing up the results. “That may not be a reflection on Obama himself as much as on the current political environment in the United States, because Obama’s immediate predecessor, Bush, had similarly polarized ratings, particularly in the latter stages of his presidency after the rally in support from the 9/11 terror attacks faded.”

Our guess is that Jones’ latter hypothesis is the right one — that 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.

Of course I disapprove of Obama - but not because he's a Democrat. I disagree on policy. on virtually every social issue, and economic issue, he's simply wrong. On foreign policy he's turned out to be better then I expected - I expected him to be disaster, and he hasn't been.

 

Comments

[Judith Anderson]

You are judging his overall foreign policy impact in the short term, Tom...count to ten.