Sad to say, Barack Obama will not unite America
President-elect Obama ran on a platform of uniting a divided country.
As I've said before, while I do not doubt his personal sincerity, I am extremely skeptical as to whether he can pull it off. For one thing, only a centrist can be a uniter- and while I continue to hope that Mr. Obama governs as a centrist, his record and his professed ideology are very far to the Left of the political spectrum. For another, I see no indication that his own base- the ideological Left wing generally, and specifically the rank-and-file of the Democratic party- are particularly inclined to give up the malice and the willingness to believe patent lies about Republicans which has been one of their most defining characteristics ever since their failed attempt to steal Florida and the presidency for Al Gore in 2000.
I quickly add that neither of these characteristics have been exactly alien to Republicans, either. But any effort by Mr.Obama to conciliate Republicans obviously would have to begin with a willingness on the part of the members of his own party to go along. My personal experience makes me extremely skeptical about that; while there are certainly exceptions, Democrats generally do not seem to be much more gracious in victory than they were in defeat.
To hear the MSM tell it, Mr. Obama's election has already united us, and brought us to the brink of a second James Monroe-style Era of Good Feeling, in which only hard core reactionaries fail to adore and place all their faith and hopes in the President-elect. The original Era of Good Feeling was marked by the essential disintegration of the Federalist party, and the development in the United States of virtual- though benign, wholly democratic, and generally accepted- one-party rule. Supposedly, in the wake of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain, the Republicans are at least in danger of going the way of the Federalists.
But a closer examination of the dynamics of this election by Jay Cost of the Real Clear Politics Horserace Blog tells a different story. Americans, it seems, did indeed enjoy a remarkable abatement of our customary political polarization between the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972 and that of Bill Clinton in 1996 (somewhat counter-intuitive, given the divisions which marked both the Vietnam War and the Clinton administration), the last eight years have approximated the level of partisan division that existed in the 1960's. If the truth be told, our level of polarization, while high, hasn't been abnormally so.
And both the media and the returns to the contrary, Mr. Cost's analysis seems to indicate, using three seperate approaches to the data, that the level divisiveness really hasn't abated much since Mr. Obama's election. Nor, he concludes in a seperate piece, was 2008 the realigning election the media have been telling us it was.
Those electoral maps of Hoover's victory in 1928 and Roosevelt's in 1932 should give the Left-leaning journalists who have been heralding Obama's election as the coming of the eschaton something to think about. Not, as Cost notes in his second piece, that the Republican party isn't in trouble, or that the Democrats may not be in power for quite a while.
But it should be borne in mind that George W. Bush isn't the issue anymore. Barack Obama is- and given both our continued polarization and the rapidity with which decisive victories can reverse themselves in the space of four years, all those "journalists" who are heralding the imminent dissolution of the Republican party or its relegation to permanent minority status in the wake of our recent election need to think again.
While I don't expect the electoral map in 2012 to turn quite as dramatically from blue to red as it turned from red to blue in 1932, I continue to believe- as I've said before- that given the seriousness and the intractability of our nation's problems, Mr. Obama has no better than a fifty-fifty chance of being re-elected four years from now.
HT: Real Clear Politics
As I've said before, while I do not doubt his personal sincerity, I am extremely skeptical as to whether he can pull it off. For one thing, only a centrist can be a uniter- and while I continue to hope that Mr. Obama governs as a centrist, his record and his professed ideology are very far to the Left of the political spectrum. For another, I see no indication that his own base- the ideological Left wing generally, and specifically the rank-and-file of the Democratic party- are particularly inclined to give up the malice and the willingness to believe patent lies about Republicans which has been one of their most defining characteristics ever since their failed attempt to steal Florida and the presidency for Al Gore in 2000.
I quickly add that neither of these characteristics have been exactly alien to Republicans, either. But any effort by Mr.Obama to conciliate Republicans obviously would have to begin with a willingness on the part of the members of his own party to go along. My personal experience makes me extremely skeptical about that; while there are certainly exceptions, Democrats generally do not seem to be much more gracious in victory than they were in defeat.
To hear the MSM tell it, Mr. Obama's election has already united us, and brought us to the brink of a second James Monroe-style Era of Good Feeling, in which only hard core reactionaries fail to adore and place all their faith and hopes in the President-elect. The original Era of Good Feeling was marked by the essential disintegration of the Federalist party, and the development in the United States of virtual- though benign, wholly democratic, and generally accepted- one-party rule. Supposedly, in the wake of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain, the Republicans are at least in danger of going the way of the Federalists.
But a closer examination of the dynamics of this election by Jay Cost of the Real Clear Politics Horserace Blog tells a different story. Americans, it seems, did indeed enjoy a remarkable abatement of our customary political polarization between the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972 and that of Bill Clinton in 1996 (somewhat counter-intuitive, given the divisions which marked both the Vietnam War and the Clinton administration), the last eight years have approximated the level of partisan division that existed in the 1960's. If the truth be told, our level of polarization, while high, hasn't been abnormally so.
And both the media and the returns to the contrary, Mr. Cost's analysis seems to indicate, using three seperate approaches to the data, that the level divisiveness really hasn't abated much since Mr. Obama's election. Nor, he concludes in a seperate piece, was 2008 the realigning election the media have been telling us it was.
Those electoral maps of Hoover's victory in 1928 and Roosevelt's in 1932 should give the Left-leaning journalists who have been heralding Obama's election as the coming of the eschaton something to think about. Not, as Cost notes in his second piece, that the Republican party isn't in trouble, or that the Democrats may not be in power for quite a while.
But it should be borne in mind that George W. Bush isn't the issue anymore. Barack Obama is- and given both our continued polarization and the rapidity with which decisive victories can reverse themselves in the space of four years, all those "journalists" who are heralding the imminent dissolution of the Republican party or its relegation to permanent minority status in the wake of our recent election need to think again.
While I don't expect the electoral map in 2012 to turn quite as dramatically from blue to red as it turned from red to blue in 1932, I continue to believe- as I've said before- that given the seriousness and the intractability of our nation's problems, Mr. Obama has no better than a fifty-fifty chance of being re-elected four years from now.
HT: Real Clear Politics
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