Turd Blossom In The Mirror

When Karl Rove and Mike Gerson hate on Obama, they're hating on themselves.

Jonathan Chait
The New Republic
Published: April 16, 2009

The depiction of Barack Obama that has emerged from some quarters of the American right is that of a Bush-like figure. He is irresponsibly running up deficits and covering them up with budgetary gimmickry. Under the guise of healing rhetoric, he ruthlessly pressures fellow partisans in Congress to toe the line. He is "filling White House ranks with former lobbyists," and his administration is devolving into general incompetence. And he has given unprecedented, Rove-like power to his political Svengali, David Axelrod. Oddly enough, the author of all these particular criticisms is Rove himself.

A similar portrait of Obama has emerged from the pens of Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, and Peter Wehner, Bush's former "director of strategic initiatives," a job that essentially entailed coordinating GOP agitprop. The Bush veterans have systematically discovered that every flaw associated in the public mind with their hero turns out to be a defining trait of Obama. I am not a trained psychologist, but some form of projection seems to be at work.

A couple of weeks ago, a Pew poll found that the partisan gap in President Obama's approval rating had reached a historic high. Rove leaped to point to this scrap of data ("no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America"), as did Gerson and Wehner. The concept of a polarized electorate assumes some rough parity between the two parties and a president hovering around 50 percent approval--as was the case with Bush around the time of his reelection, when the media would routinely describe him as "polarizing." Obama retains approval ratings around 60 percent, where they have held stable for the last month, with high approval among independents. His low approval rating among Republicans is mostly a function of the fact that the party has shrunk to a pungent, highly conservative core. Pew found that less than one-quarter of the population identifies as Republican, down from one-third in 2004.

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