David Brady says:
The Democrats at this point, all the Democrats like Obama. Republicans don’t like Obama; next to George W. Bush he’s the greatest divider since we’ve been doing public opinion. That is, subtract the percent of his party that like him, minus the percent of the other party that doesn’t like him—so if it’s 90%-10%, there’s an 80-point gap. The third and fourth highest gaps are Obama, so Obama is a divider.
Far be it from me to criticize David Brady, a political scientist who knows much more about American politics than I ever will, but . . . I think it’s a bit silly to call Obama (or Bush, for that matter) a “divider.” The whole point was that partisans have been divided for awhile and there has been a gradual increase. Saying people are divided is one thing, saying Bush and Obama did it is another.
Brady continues:
I believe that there has been an increase in partisanship. So, for the first time, with President Bush we began to see statistically significant differences. When you asked Democrats what they thought of the economy under Bush, it was horrible; when you asked Republicans, it was not so bad; so that the partisan preferences actually drove the perception of the economy. And that’s the first time that had happened in all of our polling data. So, that’s new.
Huh? In our book we cite data from 1988 (by way of Larry Bartels); see the quoted passage here. I can well believe that partisan divisions are getting worse but they’re not new. It must depend on how you measure it, if Brady is claiming there were no such differences before 2000.
In fairness to Brady, this was a live interview, not a written article, and it’s natural to get things a bit garbled in speech. If you were to transcribe everything I said in conversation, you could catch a lot of mistakes from me too.
Thus, the point of this post is not to criticize Brady but rather to clarify some of the issues that he raised.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Underlying the politicization is the sorting of economic classes into the parties and the fact that since 1980 only the upper economic classes have seen any improvement. The lower classes have seen stagnation or decline. Of course there is a division as to how each party sees the economy but it is not ideological as much as socioeconomic.
We have before us an alleged expert on American politics who asserts that a President who spent the better part of his first term bending over backwards trying to work with the Republicans was nonetheless “a divider.” This is in willful disregard of the fact that the GOP had declared from the beginning of Obama’s term that their ONLY goal was to destroy his Presidency.
This same alleged expert on American politics ignores the completely unhinged nature of the Republican fantasies that undergird their hatred of Obama—ranging from idiotic assertions that he’s a socialist who hates capitalism and America to idiotic assertions that he’s a Muslim to idiotic assertions that he got rid of Churchill’s bust—and blithely attributes that antipathy to Obama being “a divider”
Most tellingly, this alleged expert on American politics apparently dismisses the widespread and shockingly open displays of overt racism that have been directed at Obama, his wife, and his children by Republicans at all levels of government in virtually every state in the Union right from the start of the campaign in 2008, yet still claims that Obama is “a divider.”
Not only is this an illustration of just how widely the meme of “both sides do it” has spread beyond mainstream High Broderist media hackery, it’s also an indictment of Brady’s own credentials as a dispassionate, fact-based observer of reality. It’s essentially Fox News Lite in an academic environment.
Bluestatedon:
I think you’re being unfair to Brady. My take on it is that he made a simple confusion between description (partisan divisions among Americans have been high during the Bush and Obama presidencies) and causality (labeling Bush and Obama as “dividers”). I doubt this was some sort of major claim on Brady’s part; it was a spoken interview and he just spoke too fast. My point in the above blog was not to slam Brady but to clarify, in case people were to take his words too seriously.
Andrew:
I will admit to deep cynicism when it comes to most observers of American politics, and if I haven’t cut Brady appropriate slack that he deserves, my bad. In the highly charged partisan environment we’re currently in, my suspicion is that it would be just like Charles Krauthammer or David Brooks to seize on Brady’s comments and say “See folks, I told you that Obama was a radical who wanted to foment divisive class warfare!”