On the issue of whether Obama is a polarizing president, Larry J. Sabato observes:

Beginning with Clinton, the old arrangement dissolved and polarizing party politics became the norm. Today it is inevitable that, after the passage of a little time and the enunciation of a president’s program, party identifiers in the electorate will polarize in support of, or opposition to, a president based on his party label. Obama fits the modern pattern.

Maybe in an ideal world, Americans would gather together, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya for a year or so after a new president took office. And we could get rid of this recession instantly if someone would invent a way to turn granite into gold. Both developments will occur at about the same time.

He is right, of course. It is nonsense to think there aren’t sharp policy differences separating Americans. But it was this nonsense that formed a central message of the Obama campaign. He ran on a message that castigated Washington as a place where good ideas go to die, as if everyone agreed upon what good ideas were. He ran on the idea of “No Blue America, no Red America.” Either he was very naive and fundamentally misunderstood the contours of the American electorate, or he was peddling the sort of alchemy (which Sabato rightly ridicules) simply to get elected.

But there was a way Obama could have blurred some of those sharp distinctions and upset conventional wisdom. He might have fought Washington business-as-usual politics by refusing to sign the omnibus spending bill with 9,000 earmarks. He might have taken a couple of Republican ideas for the stimulus plan such as cutting the payroll tax. Or he might have renominated a number of judges named by George W. Bush, as his predecessor did for Clinton judges who had not gotten through before Bush took office. But he didn’t do any of those things. He made an affirmative choice to not minimize partisan differences.

That’s fine, but after setting ridiculous expectations Obama can’t be immune from criticism when his style of governance promotes rather than lessens hyper-partisanship.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 1:55 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.