People, Personas, and Politics 4 – Norms
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/20
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were saying that some of the reaction to disappoint and disenchantment about Obama, if I understand you correctly…
Rick Rosner: …the election, I mean the election – about how the election played out.
SDJ: Yea, maybe how the eventualities of the Obama administration played out, so that then it was a reaction to vote for Trump, even though, as you noted, Trump was saying things about everybody. It was vote for Trump, and damn all of the consequences, campaign trail.
RR: When you look at Obama’s approval rating, they reflect the current highly divided nature of the country. Where Obama was a pretty clean president, no scandals, except for made up ones, 3 out of 4 – I don’t know how far you’d have to go to get a president with as few scandals as Obama—Bush had the war. Clinton had sex. I guess, Bush I was a pretty clean guy with not—well, you had Iran-Contra, but that was mostly hung on Reagan.
I don’t know how much Bush I had to do with that. One of the things that got him kicked out of office after only one term was raising taxes after saying he wouldn’t. But that’s not scandalous. That’s just breaking a political promise. Reagan had Iran-Contra. So 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5 previous presidents had huge scandals. Obama did not. Yet Obama spent about half of his presidency with under 50% approval.
He had a W-shaped approval curve. Where it started reasonably high, fairly quickly dropped into the 40s and 50s, popped up above 50, just long enough for re-election, dropped into the 40s and in the last year of his presidency people saw a slate of unpalatable candidates. Hi approval started climbing again due to pretty much nostalgia for his presidency, even though he was president.
The approval he had in the 40s for so many years of his presidency, even though he was largely governing as a centrist and was largely scandal free shows that Republicans and Democrats hate each other right now, and will not give each other the benefit of the doubt. The defiance of norms and good behavior shows up in Trump’s election.
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