The myth of the red and the blue?

The Week in Review in tomorrow's Times carries a piece on the decline of differences among the majority of Americans on most issues, despite the angry rhetoric filling the airwaves and the humid air of Washington. From abortion to gay rights, a growing consensus is occurring, most noticeably in the extremely muted reaction to gay marriage; thought only a few months ago to be a tremendous boon to Bush as a campaign issue, it has pretty much dropped from the campaign's radar due to lack of public interest. Kevin Drum was thinking about the same thing, he says.

The Times piece argues that the reason our era sounds so shrill, despite this growing consensus, is the ideological and intellectual leaders of the various political movements, from NARAL to the NRA and MoveOn to the Club for Growth. From the American Enterprise Institute to...well, I don't know of any liberal counterpart to that.

In fact, the disagreements about which we're screaming so loudly past one other are especially trivial when compared to the past:

"Compared to earlier periods - the Civil War, the 1930's, the 1960's - our disagreements now are not that deep," Professor Wolfe said last week. "Indeed, it is only because we agree so much on so many things that we can allow ourselves the luxury of thinking we are having a culture war. When one of society's deepest divisions is over stem cells, that society is pretty unified."

But, that's a rather lofty set of comparisons, isn't it? I mean, the Civil War, the foundations-of-capitalism-shaking of the Great Depression, and the literally incendiary 1960s? Those are tough acts to follow.

The article concludes, though, that there is one issue that is truly and deeply dividing the country right now: George W. Bush (that "uniter not a divider" guy).

A senior strategist for the Bush campaign, Matthew Dowd, does not believe that anyone can overcome the partisan divide this year. Noting that Democrats gave overwhelmingly negative ratings to Mr. Bush the year before the Iraq war, he said: "A portion of the Democratic electorate doesn't like Bush no matter he does. I wonder if they'd be supporting the Iraq war if Clinton were conducting it. But when it comes to Bush, they've made up their minds."

But Professor Fiorina insists the voters are merely responding to a president who is more partisan than virtually all of his modern predecessors. A president who played more to the center might not stir such strong reaction, he said.

"What if Bush had not ignored the widely accepted Powell doctrine by launching the war in Iraq, never proposed drilling in the Arctic refuge and never supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage?" he asked. "It's the actions he takes that polarize the voters in both parties. A candidate who seized the middle ground against a polarizing candidate could still win handily."

Dowd is right, but he ignores the reasons for the overwhelmed negative ratings for Bush before the war in Iraq.

Those ratings aren't because, as so many on the right believe, we felt like the election was stolen, or that Bush the Illegitimate is, well, illegitimate. Those feelings were certainly front and center on Sept. 10, 2001. But within days of Sept. 11 Americans from a wide political perspective were willing to stand behind the President. We supported the war in Afghanistan overwhelmingly and approved of his cautious approach in not nuking five or six countries in the middle east.

But then he blew it. Or perhaps we'd blown it by trusting him in the first place. He had an opportunity to lead, to reach out to the vast majority of Americans and stop being a sop to his "base," but instead he returned to his pre-9-11 policy of acting as though he'd won a landslide in 2000, pushing tax cuts and executive branch secrecy, coupled with...John Ashcroft. And then he took Iraq, for which reasonable people could argue reasonably, and turned it into a sharply partisan, "with us or agin' us," gun to the head that was aggressively marketed by his henchmen.

We thought we'd made a deal. He screwed us. We know now that we were naive. That's why he's the most polarizing president in recent history.