Dividers, Not Uniters

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Weekly Standard:

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the creation of Trumpism. The p.c. insanity on college campuses. Globalization and the hollowing out of the working class. ISIS in Paris and San Bernardino. The broadcast media that donated $1.898 billion in free media to the cause. Let's stipulate all of that and much else besides.

 

But for a moment, consider the contributions of Barack Obama. Because as divisive as Donald Trump is, all he has done is raise the bar set by the most divisive president since Reconstruction.

As an empirical matter, it's maybe more precise to say that Obama is the most divisive president since Eisenhower, because that's when Gallup began measuring such things: By the pollster's reckoning, the partisan gap in Obama's 2012 approval rating is a yawning, historic 76 points. Remember how divisive the Bush years were? The Obama years have been worse. And it's not just a partisan divide. In 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll asked respondents if they viewed Obama as more of a divider or uniter. It wasn't even close among independ-ents, 59 percent of whom said he's been a divider.

 

Where would people get such an idea? Possibly from how Obama treated his opposition. A few days after taking office in 2009, Obama invited a bipartisan group from Congress to the White House to discuss his stimulus proposal. Senator Jon Kyl — not exactly a firebrand — prodded Obama to consider a different mix of spending and tax cuts. Obama's two-word response: "I won." In August of that year at a presidential speech, Obama told a room of adoring supporters, "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to just get out of the way." In February 2010, Obama convened a bipartisan summit on his health care reform package. At one point, Republicans requested that Obama do a little less filibustering and be a little more respectful of their equal time. His response: "I'm the president."

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What hath Obama wrought?