Well that didn't take long. You'll recall that on Monday I wrote about how conservatives were about to take a new PEW poll and twist it against Obama, claiming that he's the most polarizing president EVER, even more so than George Bush?
Well, it's begun, courtesy of the Washington Post.
Now, you'd think the Post would have some issues with publishing, even commentary, that promotes right-wing talking points that have already been debunked. Greg Sargent over at the Post's own Plum Line investigated this newest line of attack on Monday, and got none of than PEW itself to say that the notion that their poll shows Obama to be polarizing is bunk. Here's what the head of PEW's polling unit told Greg:
The fellow who oversees Pew Research’s political polling is disputing the claim, made by some on the right today, that the much-discussed new Pew poll showing a stark partisan divide in Obama’s approval rating proves that Obama is a “polarizing” President.But that didn't stop the Post from, only 48 hours later, bringing the lie back to life.
“It’s unfair to say that Obama has caused this divisiveness or to say that he is a polarizing president,” Michael Dimock, Pew’s associate director, told me in an interview just now.
So now we have to, once again, dissect the same lie we already put the rest on Monday. Sigh.
In a nutshell, the new poll shows that Republicans and Democrats are divided on their approval of Obama. Even more so than Rs and Ds were over their approval of George Bush. The Post writer claims that this is because Obama is a super-duper polarizer, and overall a bad man. What the PEW people actually found was quite the opposite. The guilty party, responsible for this partisan divide, isn't Obama - it's the Republicans themselves.
What PEW found is that Democrats traditionally give a new president a pass, even when the president is from the opposing party. Republicans, however, are less charitable - they tend to be more critical, less approving, of a new Democratic president than Democrats are of a new Republican president. That's one reason that the partisan divide is greater during Obama's first few months than during Bush's - because Democrats are less partisan than Republicans.
As an aside, this is a point that the Post commentary today outright lied about. The commentary claimed that both Dems and Republicans in the past have given new presidents a fair shake. What it doesn't tell you - gee, I wonder why - is that Dems have traditionally been far more fair-shaking than Republicans in this regard, and the numbers prove it. Again, from PEW via Greg:
[PEW's] Dimock also said this phenomenon is partly caused by the recent tendency of Republicans to be less charitable towards new Presidents than Dems have been.In other words, it's patently false to suggest that things were even in the past but somehow uneven now. Republicans have always been more critical.
In contrast to the 27% of GOPers approving of Obama now, more than a third of Dems (36%) approved of George W. Bush at a comparable time in 2001. Before that, only 26% of Republicans approved of Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, while 41% of Dems approved of both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan at comparable times.
The second reason that PEW found for the divide under Obama is that Republicans have actually gotten even more partisan - less willing to give the new Democratic president a fair shake - over the past few years, so they're being even harsher on Obama than they were on Democratic presidents before him.
So, rather than this poll showing evidence that Obama is somehow different, and more polarizing, than previous Democratic presidents, what the poll actually shows is that Republicans have gotten more polarized all on their own. Obama could have been a turnip, and Republicans would have hated him more than ever.
One final point that a reader mentioned after I'd written Monday's piece, and it's a point I've raised before. The reason "Republicans" are more polarized than ever vis-a-vis Obama is because millions of Americans have fled the Republican party under George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, and Rush Limbaugh. An increasing number of those remaining in the party, those still willing to call themselves "Republican" when the pollster comes knocking on the door, are the Limbaugh/Dobson/Palin wing of the party. In a nutshell, the angry wackos who, of course, can't stand Obama simply because Obama has a "D" after his name (and maybe even for some other reasons that have nothing to do with the content of his character).
The GOP has quite literally distilled itself into a party of hate and extremism. It's the reason you now can't win a GOP primary without being an angry, intolerant, far right gun-hugging, Bible-thumping, gay-bashing nut. And it's the reason polls, up until the end of his presidency, continued to show so many "Republicans" approving of George Bush's job as president. All the rats who disapproved of Bush, who had a modicum of sense, already fled the proverbial ship.
So, yes, the far right of the Republican party loathes Obama. Unfortunately, they're no longer the far right of the party. They are the party.
