Ryan Streeter
The Gallup numbers released today really are remarkable.
They show Obama as the most polarizing President in his 2nd year in office by a significant margin. The 68% party gap is a full 12 points ahead of second place, Ronald Reagan in 1983. The chart is below.
What is most interesting about these figures is that the poll was taken at a time in January when Obama was getting kudos from various quarters for his "move to the middle," and his overall approval ratings were rising.
I suspect the gap in these figures could have been wider if the poll were taken after the SOTU, in which Obama expressed a total lack of moral seriousness about the big issues facing the nation. The polarization numbers are really an effect of how much trust people in the other party have for a president, and Obama has done very little to show he hears the other side's concerns about spending and business uncertainty (two issues, I suspect, on which conservatives continue to be highly suspicious of the President regardless of his overtures to the right).
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