Of the Right, Not Much Left

A germinating meme among what is left of the American right at the conclusion of President Obama’s first 100 days in office is that the new president has been uniquely polarizing. The seeds for this notion were planted by a Pew Research Center poll released Apr. 2 attesting to an unprecedented 61 percentage-point gap between the levels of approval of the president expressed by Democrats and Republicans. Since then, a veritable rogues’ gallery of former Bush administration staffers, including former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, and former Deputy Assistant to the President Peter Wehner—an ironic crowd to be maligning others for partisanship—have been on the attack.

In an Apr. 8 column for the Wall Street Journal, Rove claimed that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.” This indictment was seconded by Gerson, who declared Obama to be more polarizing than Presidents Nixon, Reagan, or Bush in an Apr. 8 column for the Washington Post, and Wehner, who, in a blog post Apr. 6 for Commentary Magazine, asked, “Is a record-setting divide among Democrats and Republicans at such an early point in his presidency really the change we were told we could believe in?”

These once and current partisans would have made a convincing case that the current commander-in-chief is a Clintonesque sower of partisan discord had their contentions not neglected certain inconvenient details.

The most egregious of these omissions is the fact that today’s GOP is but a phantom of its former self. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Apr. 26, while 35 percent of Americans identify themselves as Democratic and 38 percent as independent, only 21 percent of Americans currently identify themselves as Republican. Like some grotesque Russian-nested doll, the Republican coalition has been losing constituencies one by one, so that now only the most virulently reactionary elements of its base remain.

It implies something entirely different to garner support from an opposition that consists of a significant and diverse sliver of the electorate than one that consists of nothing more than its uncompromising base. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush failed to win over the most hardline Democrats, so one cannot fault Obama for failing to penetrate the bowels of the Republican camp.

However, those whom he did have a chance of convincing—the Republican moderates—have largely abandoned their party to become independents or Democrats. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is the latest of these converts. In order to gauge the breadth of Obama’s popularity fairly, therefore, one must turn to his support among independents.

According to Pew, Obama’s national approval and approval among independents is virtually identical, with 59 percent approving nationally and 57 percent of independents concurring.

Granted, Obama has hardly been more bipartisan than the average president despite his pledge to be so. His courtship of congressional Republicans has been largely symbolic, failing to adopt any of their ideas despite spending more time with House Republicans than President Bush did. His stimulus bill garnered only three GOP votes out of 219 in both houses of Congress, and that was more than his budget received.

However, Obama appointed three Republicans to his cabinet, pursued centrist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan that Senator John McCain has praised, included in his stimulus package one of the largest tax cuts in history despite calls from the left for fewer tax cuts and more spending, and resisted calls for nationalizing major banks. To claim that Obama has been the most partisan president ever, therefore, is both disingenuous and more than a little partisan itself.


Dhruv K. Singhal ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Straus Hall.