From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Obama’s best friend: a seething, sniping right
A poll indicating a sharply divided US proves Obama has won the fight for the centre
Andrew Sullivan
It was a slim reed but former Bush officials understandably grasped it. A lone poll last week showed a large gap in Barack Obama’s approval ratings between Democratic and Republican voters. The Pew poll found, as Karl Rove boasted in The Wall Street Journal, that Obama “has the most polarised early job approval of any president since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points”. This is 10 points larger than George W Bush’s partisan gap after the brutal polarising period of the 2000 election recount.
Does this mean that Obama has failed to deliver on his new politics? Is the red-blue split just as deep and just as debilitating as it was for the Bush administration? And is this Obama’s fault? Rove would like to think so. So would the former Bush speech-writer and adviser Michael Gerson, who echoed Rove’s line. He wrote in The Washington Post – or more accurately dreamt – that “Obama’s polarising approach challenges and changes the core of his political identity”. For the partisan right, turning Obama into another left-lib-eral is key to finding a way back to some kind of political relevance. The politics it has always used – and that Rove specialised in – is dividing the country into red and blue, and working wedge issues such as abortion, gay rights, torture and national security to expand the red.
The trouble for the Bush Republicans is that the poll – and most other surveys now coming in as Obama nears his 100-day mark – do not yet bear out this analysis. First, the partisan polarisation has grown with every presidency in the past few decades, as the parties have settled into more cohesive ideological groupings. Second, Obama has made some rather blunt out-reaches to the right, including large tax cuts in his stimulus package, postponement of withdrawal from Iraq, a ramped-up effort in Afghanistan, a conservative evangelical at his inauguration, and more meetings with congressional Republicans than even Bush held.
Americans noticed this, which is why they find it hard to suddenly believe that Obama is the second coming of Michael Moore or Fidel Castro. But the third point is far more important. The poll measures a gap between Democrats and Republicans, but it doesn’t tell you how many there are of each. Self-identifying Republicans now form only 24% of the American electorate, their lowest showing in recent memory, and far lower than at the start of Bush’s term. And those who are left in the rump tend to be more conservative and more ideological than a larger, more heterogeneous group.
You can see this by a simple measure: some 68% of Republicans identify as ideological conservatives while only 37% of Democrats identify as ideological liberals. When the Republican party is much smaller, more ideological, and more radical than the Democrats, of course a Democratic president will prompt more angry and motivated opposition than a Republican. And so Bush won support from a generous 36% of Democrats in April 2001; while Obama gets only 27% support from Republicans.
The upswing in virulent Republican hostility has been the most marked feature of the first three months of Obama’s presidency. Obama has been called a socialist and a fascist by Fox News’s newest ratings star, Glenn Beck. Another star of the right, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, has warned that Obama intends to force the young into mandatory reeducation camps. Another leading light, the former senator Rick Santorum, has written that Obama “has a deep-seated antipathy towards American values and traditions”.
Michael Savage, the popular right-wing talk show host, warned last week of “a rising tide of pink fascism in this country, and it comes as a result of the election of Barack Hussein Obama”. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has warned that Obama has an open borders policy designed to increase illegal immigration. This week, rallies are planned in main cities, promoted aggressively by Fox News, to protest against looming socialism and debt. And the more you penetrate the sub-culture of the post2008 right, the angrier and more frightened it appears. Under this onslaught from conservative media and political outlets, it is not that surprising that Obama’s negatives among Republicans and even independents has jumped.
But this, when you come to think about it, is far more worrying for the Republicans than for Obama, if Obama maintains a centre-left course. The right’s strategy is clear: define Obama as a far-left radical, and wait. Offer nothing substantive as policy alternatives, but keep the drumbeat up. It’s a classic strategy – and it was what John McCain and Hillary Clinton tried last year.
Now look at the independent vote. So far, independent disapproval of Obama has indeed gone up since January – but from such low levels to begin with (a mere 14% disapproved three months ago) – it would be premature to make that much of it. But when you look at broader numbers, you find that a whopping 70% of independents in the poll cited by Rove have confidence in Obama to address the deep problems the US faces. On the basic approval question, the Pew numbers give you 61% approval overall – with independents approving of Obama by 56% and Republicans by 29%. With independent support more than double the Republican support and closer to stratospheric Democratic backing, Obama has won the battle for the centre.
Now look at other impressive data. Large majorities believe that the economic crisis will take a long time to fix and are not impatient for results. Hispanic voters – the fast-est-growing demographic – give Obama a 73% approval rating; the under30s give him 75% approval.
In the poll of polls, Obama’s disapproval rate has actually dropped from the high thirties to the low thirties in just the past month. What’s striking is that as Republican hostility has soared, the rest of the country has actually warmed to the new president. When Obama took office, only 26% of Americans believed their country was on the right track. That number is now 40% and rising steadily. In January 23% approved of Congress; now 35% do. Obama’s personal favourable ratings are now higher than when he won the election.
There are dangers. The long-term debt is indeed worrying, and if Obama has done nothing to address it by 2010, he will suffer. But my own sense is that the country is taking the measure of the man, likes him personally and is not uncomfortable with most of his policies. The Republican base, meanwhile, is seething. Put those two trends together, and polarisation is Obama’s secret weapon – as long as the Republicans remain at one isolated pole, and he moves persistently and pragmatically forward.
