North and South Poles

North and South Poles

by digby

This is a fascinating little factoid, but I’m not sure it means what people think it means:

President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings were even more polarized during his second year in office than during his first, when he registered the most polarized ratings for a first-year president. An average of 81% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans approved of the job Obama was doing as president during his second year. That 68-point gap in party ratings is up from 65 points in his first year and is easily the most polarized second year for a president since Dwight Eisenhower.

It’s not that the president is “polarizing.” It’s that the American people are polarized. There’s always been this tribal difference, but during the long middle period of the 20th century, we because a little bit less polarized and I think it may have been because of mass media. With the advent of an explicitly political right wing news media on a mass scale, it’s bifurcated again.

In any case, Obama isn’t really doing anything particularly polarizing. His most contentious action was passing an industry friendly health insurance reform. But the country is so polarized that it doesn’t even see reality in the same way and that’s not his fault. No one man could fix that problem, particularly with the malefactors of great wealth pulling strings to keep it that way. (This works well for them — it means government can’t function very well.)

And well, he is the first black president. I’m fairly sure that was always going to cause some dissonance among those for whom such things are important.

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