Obama as a "polarizing" president

In today's New York Times, Peter Beinart describes President Obama as having "failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president" and calls him "our third highly polarizing president in a row":

“Let’s face it, he’s failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president, the one who can use rationality and calm debate to bridge our traditional divides,” said Peter Beinart, a liberal essayist who is publishing a history of hubris in politics. “It turns out he’s our third highly polarizing president in a row. But for his liberal base, it confirms that they were right to believe in the guy — and they had their doubts.”

There's no question that Obama has highly polarized approval ratings. It's less clear whether he could have done anything to avoid this fate, particularly given the GOP strategy of unified opposition to his initiatives. Beinart seems to think Obama's decision not to scale back health care reform was polarizing, but as Matthew Yglesias points out in The Daily Beast there was no one in the GOP caucus to compromise with. And even if Obama had struck a deal with a handful of moderate Republicans, does anyone think it would have closed the partisan gap in his approval ratings?

In general, the problem with Beinart's analysis, which seems to fault Obama for this outcome, is that it's virtually impossible to be a non-polarizing president in contemporary American politics. Like George W. Bush, Obama made unrealistic promises to bring the parties together, but there was little chance he would succeed. As UCSD's Gary Jacobson has shown, presidential approval ratings by party have diverged widely over the last thirty or so years (the one partial exception is George H.W. Bush, a non-conservative holdover from the pre-Reagan era):

For the foreseeable future, every president will have highly polarized approval ratings outside of honeymoon periods, wars, and foreign policy crises. Obama's inability to escape this fate isn't a "failure" so much as it is, well, reality.

Update 3/22 11:53 AM: There's a similar passage in David Sanger's news analysis in the Times above Boehlert's quote that I should have included (via Eric Boehlert):

But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.

The same argument applies.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Comments

[metrichead.blogspot.com]

The promise of a "postpartisan" Washington was about as absurd as electing Obama creating a "post-racial" America.

Here's to hoping Skip Gates is doing better.

[David]

"...the effort to be the nonpolarizing president"

ROTFLMAO. Obama's "effort to be nonpolarizing" included
-- Socializing substantial portion of auto industry
-- Giving GM to the union rather than the senior bond-holders
-- Moving toward socialized medicine with a plan that accepted no Republican ideas
-- Frequently insulting George Bush and other Republicans.
-- Giving Democratic patrons lots and lots of goodies to in the so-called "stimulus" bill.
-- Excluding Republican ideas for fighting the recession in the "stimulus bill".

The New York Times has no comics pages. Their comedy appears within their editorials and news analyses.

[David Stephens]

Couldn't have said it better myself. If Beinart was blaming Obama for failing to end polarization he was surely off the mark. From this distance across the Pacific the 'politics as usual'troglodytes in the GOP deserve a good proportion of the blame.

[MartyB]

Brendan,

Your point is well taken that perhaps we can’t blame the President for current party polarization. The essays you mention possibly say more about the unrealistic expectations of the writers about Obama’s ability or create less polarization, given his campaign speeches to that effect.

However, your use of Yglesias’ comment that “there was no one in the GOP caucuses to compromise with” seems more an argument for Obama’s polarizing tendencies than against them.

If two parties can’t find common ground to compromise around, it means either one (or both) of the parties occupy extreme positions – the kind of extreme positions that are most polarizing. With that in mind, which is more likely: that every single one of the opposition holds extreme polarizing positions or that that President holds an extreme polarizing position?

Occam’s razor would suggest the latter. After all, many of the opposition GOP have found areas to agree with the Democrats at times in the past, so they are unlikely all to be extreme.

One other item that your argument doesn’t address is the influence of the independent voter, where polarization really occurs – the base of each party will generally love or hate their on guy regardless of his positions on a few issues.

In nearly all polls I’ve seen, the President’s position on Healthcare has swung from early approval by independents of the idea of health reform to strong disapproval of the (near) final legislation. These statistics tend to support the “polarizing” argument.

[Howard.Craft]

Obama isn't polarizing...he eventually won reluctant support from Dennis Kuninich. That's bridge building at its best.

[Don H.]

@Marty...LOL

Obama has hurled insults to both Republicans and our Supreme court in his State of the Union. To suggest that he bears no blame is laughable.

Now, if you had stated that Pelosi and like share the blame, then I would be in total agreement. The fact is Republicans are a minority and have little to no say in how the HCR bills were written. Simply put, they were ignored. The President could have and should have made it his business to not let that happen with such sweeping legislation such as HCR. But he did and now there will be a price to pay.