By Selwyn Duke
President G.W. Bush might very well have been sincere when he proclaimed, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” but it nevertheless was boilerplate political rhetoric. Barack Obama, too, campaigned on the idea of uniting our nation. It’s an interesting fantasy.
But the reality is quite different. Recent polls show that if we’re to measure a President’s unitive capacity based on how divided opinion on him is, Obama is the most polarizing Commander-in-Chief in history. Writes The Washington Post, “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 President also registered the highest partisan gaps on record for his first and second years in office, 65 and 68 percent, respectively.
Adding perspective, however, the Post points out how this simply hews to recent divided-electorate trends, with seven of the 10 years with the largest presidential approval gaps having occurred since 2004. Writes the paper, “Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.”
Of course, it should be noted that Bush and Obama weren’t operating on the same playing field. You’re going to seem a lot more divisive when the whole of the mainstream media — from which liberals generally draw their (mis)information — agitates against you 24/7/365, as was Bush’s fate. As for Obama, his definition of unity may be a bit different from everyone else’s. This is the man who said that middle-American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…,” who thumbed his nose at the Senate and made recess appointments when that body wasn’t actually in recess, who used underhanded tactics to buy passage of unconstitutional ObamaCare and who appointed avowed communists to office. He also essentially said that Latinos should view other Americans as enemies and imprudently took the side of black college professor Henry Louis Gates against white Cambridge police officers. In the same vein, when he could have stood up and shown that he really was President of all the people and enjoyed a political win-win situation in the process, he instead dropped a voting-rights case against Black Panthers who were brazenly intimidating white Philadelphia voters in 2008.
Read the rest here.
