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Subscribe to RSSThe Washington Post: “For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever. (The previous high was George W. Bush in 2007, when he had a 59 percent difference in job approval ratings.)
In 2010, the partisan gap between how Obama was viewed by Democrats versus Republicans stood at 68 percent; in 2009, it was 65 percent. Both were the highest marks ever for a president’s second and first years in office, respectively. What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.”
Politico writes that Obama is “being joined by a critical mass of Washington influentials — witnessing the inability of the two parties to find common ground on the budget in 2011 — who are ready to discard the old ideal: Politicians huddling behind closed doors to cut deals is no longer viewed as necessarily even a desirable scenario, much less a plausible one.
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The right side of the political brain has been severed from the left side. The body is slumped over unable to move.
We have Rupert Murdoch to thank for this. Murdoch and his money-making propaganda machine.
Wake up, America, before he owns us!
Notice the first year gap, and this was after he won a respectable majority in the election. Instincts say that it is pure racism with hints of xenophobia (he's just different and didn't grow up here). Another is the sad fact that propaganda does work. 24/7 of Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, et. al. does have an effect. (How else to explain the immediate and extreme dislike of Obama? Remember the Tea Party was born in Feb. '09 - Obama hadn't even unpacked the boxes at the White House). And lastly, it's a classic case of transference. The people/masses are screwed - so who's the guy in charge? It's like if on the Titanic the ship's captain had jumped ship right after hitting the iceberg. The first mate takes over as captain and he gets all the blame when the ship goes down.
There's that race card again...couldn't have anything to do with his policies, noooo.
As I said, the guy hadn't even unpacked, he had just won a majority of the "voting" electorate, and there weren't any policies yet in place or even barely proposed. Rick Santelli was upset because the stock market was still going down, although that if you had bought the market on March 9, 2009, you can party with Romney. There simply was nothing tangible that Obama did or said within the first six months to warrant that divide. It surely wasn't the "stimulus." I'd venture that 75% of the electorate did want the government to do something, anything and they didn't care what it was. And the deficit? That couldn't have been an issue yet - he hadn't spent anything. The deficit was trumped up by the GOP on day one to curtail any efforts by Obama and the Dems to do anything that might be viewed as constructive.
Partisanship is being promoted by a 24/7 media ratings frenzy. Republicans have FOX, democrats have MSNBC and each have their stable of pundits cheering on the divisiveness. You can hear it in interviews - no original thoughts, only the brainwashed repeating of the party's talking points.
You're right Ursula, we need real journalists not ratings journalists. Journalism is not how high your ratings are, it's how well you inform the country as a whole. And on that the media fails.
I'm not sure there is an equivalency. If the barbarians are attempting to storm the gates, reason and diplomacy are probably not the best responses. This is where the "main stream media" has both let us down and lost it's credibility (deserved and undeserved). If FOX pounds away every day that the NY Times and CBS are the liberal media, they effectively neutralized what for decades had been otherwise viewed as fairly impartial/unbiased news reporting.
This fall we elected a new mayor of Portland, ME.
I went to several candidates' forums. At one of them, it was asked of the candidates, how do you see the role of a mayor? One of the candidates gave basically a "the buck stops here" answer, where he said he would take responsibility for anything and everything that goes wrong in the city. His answer was met by enthusiastic applause. But the next candidate, who eventually won the election, had a different answer. He said, if we have problems in our schools, for example, it is everybody's problem, not just the mayor's. The only way we can improve our city, is if everybody contributes to the effort. A bell went off in my head, listening to that response. I think we have gotten too executive-branch centric in our country. The truth is, it is all our responsibilty, to make this country work.
That's great Amy, but a Mayor's race is a close nit community coming together listening to and discussing the best choice for Mayor in a forum. In state and national election all we have is the media to inform us where a candidate stands. And the media is failing miserably.
The media reports on the horserace, not the issues, that's for sure. Like Facebook, newsreporting only exists to get you to click on the ads, so to speak.
When there is an administration backing illegal aliens, labor unions, A.C.O.R.N., student rights, and Occupy Wall St. you will find a socialist leader supporting socialistic ideas and creating class warfare....which is why he will get his votes from these groups and probably win.
You should check out the Lawrence (Kans.) Journal World today. The state agriculture secretary (GOP) is pleading for a waiver from Obama to allow illegal aliens in the state to work the fields and pick the crops.
Mr.29
The Obama administration was deported more illegal aliens in three years, than the BUSH administraion did in eight.
The media is really missing the forest for the trees on this partisanship issue. Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders made it clear in 2009 that they were going to make Obama's presidency fail. And the Republicans in the Senate have filibustered many of his appointees to be undersecretaries (and of course everyone he has nominated for the new consumer protection agency). They are filibustering many of his judicial appointments. On major legislative proposals EVERY Republican senator votes against and 99% of the House Republicans vote against. It is suicide to play nice with an opposition like that. There will be no meaningful compromise this year, because Republicans know that if the economy grows at over 3% this year, they don't stand a chance in hell in November.