When George W. Bush made the pledge at the beginning of his presidency in 2000 to be a “uniter, not a divider,” he couldn’t have imagined his phrase being turned on its head and made into a very literate book. Despite the president’s stated intentions, Gary C. Jacobson argues that the younger Bush has been “the most divisive occupant of the White House in the last 50 years,” in the new book, A Divider, Not a Uniter.
In this book, Jacobson draws a political history of the American people starting in the 50’s, showing how ideology and political affiliation have shaped the two-parties that seem to have become polar opposites. For the past few years, it has been easy to associate conservative views with Republicans and liberal with Democrat, but statistics show that association has come about gradually. The Republicans who elected Eisenhower showed a lot of liberal views, and JFK’s supporters were much less enthusiastic about gay rights and abortion than Democrats of the current era.
While the party lines have been shifting toward bi-partisan politics upon the line of social conservative and social democratic attitudes, the current presidency has dramatically increased this trend. The five defining events of the George W. Bush era showed decreasing approval ratings and increasing party polarization: September 11, 2001; Iraq invasion; Suddam Hussein’s capture; the Abu Ghraib scandal; and Hurricane Katrina. The way Jacobson made the statistical connections with world political changes is fascinating. The American public has gone from supporting their president at about 90 percent at its peak in September 2001, down to below 50 percent after Hurricane Katrina, while those who support the president are even more enthusiastic about his leadership.
Jacobson offers some hypotheses about this trend, including the president’s Christian following and his strong views on stem-cell research, abortion, and birth control.
What is most interesting is how the Americans respond to changes in the war effort. As the war drags on, Democrats because cynical, yet Republicans become more adamant that the set course be followed. Jacobson’s analysis is both fascinating and enlightening.
The glaring problem with this book is that the average reader, assuming he/she does not have a background in social science or taken a statistics course, will almost certainly be bogged down by the charts and graphs. While Jacobson does very well to explain the figures, one cannot help but feel that the text takes second seat to the bar graphs and scatter plots - numbering over one-hundred.
The back cover cites a Washington Post review noting that “unlike most books about Bush, Jacobson’s is neither ideological nor polemical.” While I agree with this observation, I believe that a book that is neither ideological nor polemical is neither accessible nor appealing to most. There is no disputing Jacobson’s argument that politics in America is becoming more partisan, but he cannot give context to this change. He can show a graph of how Southern voters have changed over the years, but he does not show the social context of how individuals in the South have changed. It leaves the reader feeling like one of the numbers in his statistics, or lowly dot on a scatter plot.
Jacobson’s argument is solid, well-researched, and dry. While it is an important study in political science, it does little to show the social context of these changes, and thus offers little to readers who pickup this book to understand more about their world.
This book is aimed at political enthusiasts who are more than weekend pundits. What the focus groups and government statistics cannot offer this book is what it really needs – a voice that explains what is going on in the US, and for that, you will have to look elsewhere.
