I know this sounds quaint, but I remain convinced that our political discourse would be improved if reporters stuck to reporting … and pollsters stuck to presenting the results of their polls and surveys, keeping their opinions to themselves unless we ask for them. It’s not as though we have a shortage of opinion or sources to find it without having it shoved at us in pieces that aren’t supposed to be platforms for their authors’ points of view.
To pick one of the less offending examples, Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, reports the results today in the Wall Street Journal of a new Quinnipiac poll that demonstrates Obama’s rapidly declining popularity, especially among men, whites, and independents.
Those are encouraging results to folks of my persuasion (it’s always encouraging when the public agrees with us), and I appreciate the poll and Brown’s presentation of its findings. But I don’t appreciate his overreaching editorializing (and not for the first time), such as the following:
A comparison of the public’s views of him then [a year ago] and now tells us a great deal about the shape of American politics and how difficult it is for any president, even one as politically gifted as Barack Obama, to surmount the nation’s deep political and ideological divisions.
The public’s views of Obama now and then may or may not tell us “a great deal about the shape of American politics” today, but I do not believe they tell us much if anything about “how difficult it is for any president [let’s leave Obama’s ostensible talents out of the equation] to surmount the nation’s deep political and ideological divisions.”
What I believe Obama’s presidency to date shows us is what happens when a determined left-wing president, elected in large part because of rejection of his predecessor rather than an embrace of his own predilections, tries to impose a plethora left policies on a center-right nation.
Of course we have “deep political and ideological divisions,” but the failure of a committed left-wing ideologue to “surmount” them does not mean they are insurmountable, does not demonstrate that those divisions could not be surmounted by someone from either party truly determined to govern from closer to the center.
The divisions we face now are far wider than when Obama came into office, because of Obama’s own actions and rhetoric. To lament the difficulty of transcending them now is rather like lamenting the fact (as though it were fate) that someone who continues to dig furiously is standing in a deepening hole.
