Obama’s Approval Polarization: Man or Country?

Gallup has an interesting data point showing that President Obama’s “approval polarization” is the highest on record, going back to the Eisenhower administration:

A few thoughts spring to mind.

First, it’s the kind of thing that sounds “bad” at first blush. But is it? The top four polarization ratings belong to Obama, Clinton, W Bush, and Reagan. Is that bad company, as compared to a Johnson, Ford, or Carter?

Second, it appears that there may be a time trend at work in the data. If approval polarization has increased since 1980, then Obama’s approval gap might be more attributable to the U.S. political climate than to the man himself (there are plenty of factors that would lend support to such an argument). And note that of the last five presidencies, the one with the lowest first year polarization was the only one that ended after a single term. Admittedly, that last point’s a stretch, given the small sample size and the fact that the 1992 election occurred in the fourth year of GHWB’s presidency.  But it still supports that argument that this poll finding is more complicated than a first glance might imply.

On the ”sounds bad at first blush” phenomenon — my favorite is this line parroted by some cloudy headed thinkers: ”We’re the only species that drinks the milk of another species.” First, it would be nice to have a biologist confirm that nothing similar occurs in the animal kingdom, as symbioses are everywhere, and humans just happen to have the capacity (thumbs, brains, technological innovation) to do it exceptionally well. But second and most important, we’re also the only species that wears shoes, or belts, or underwear, or any other article of clothing (leather or hemp, you decide), drives cars, writes greeting cards, makes phone calls, worships formally, produces electricity, brews coffee, invents movements like veganism, writes and reads weblogs, pierces ears and other body parts, develops organizations like PETA, plays informal and organized sports, demonstrates outside corporations and furriers, goes to college, reads magazines, goes to concerts, buys housewares, hang glides, tells time, uses cell phones, base jumps, etc.  The list is awfully long. So being the only species that “does something” doesn’t mean that that something is necessarily bad. Likewise, it’s not possible to say that Obama’s polarized approval ratings are “good” or “bad” without deeper analysis.

URLs:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125345/Obama-Approval-Polarized-First-Year-President.aspx