It was exhilarating -- that night in July 2004, when a young Senate candidate from Illinois stood before a national television audience, invoked his improbable Kenyan-Kansan background, and called upon Americans to unite.
"There's not a liberal America and a conservative America," Barack Obama said. "There's the United States of America. ... We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. ... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."Those powerful words, and the powerful hope they expressed, helped propel Obama to the presidency and, ultimately, to his bitter re-election struggle against Mitt Romney.In 2012, though, his language, and that of his Democratic surrogates, was different: "Romnesia," "Romney bet against America" and, in one television ad, "Mitt Romney -- he's not one of us."In 2004, Obama denounced "those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of 'anything goes.'" In this campaign, some of those people worked for him.It's not, as his worst detractors on the right would have it, that Barack Obama is some kind of unusually sinister politician who revealed his true nature after taking office. Nor is it sufficient to protest, as Obama's supporters do, that he had to respond in kind when faced with unprecedented GOP demonization.The problem is simpler: Obama's 2004 speech, though undoubtedly sincere, was not true. Americans were deeply divided then, and are, if anything, more deeply divided now.Polarization has reached the point where party affiliation predicts a person's beliefs better than race, education, income, religiosity or gender, according to a remarkable study published in June by the Pew Research Center.Divergent social systems, founded in divergent value systems, are taking root in different regions. Meanwhile, pundits and politicians spend far more energy on mockery and hatred than on mutual comprehension.This is why Obama was the second president in a row to win election as a uniter -- and then campaign for re-election by trashing his opponent and herding his party's base to the polls.No doubt the president would reject this comparison to George W. Bush. But I mean it as a statement of reality, not an accusation. This is just the way presidential politics works in a polarized milieu. Obama offered 2012 voters not hope but "a choice between two fundamentally different visions for America." Romney, too, painted his disagreements with the president in stark terms.Both men promised the party faithful that electoral victory will mean policy triumph; if recent history has shown anything, though, it is that neither party is strong enough to impose its agenda. Our predicament calls for a different kind of politics -- in the tradition of the sectional Great Compromises of pre-Civil War America, including the deals embodied in the Constitution itself.In those grand bargains, seemingly irreconcilable factions stopped trying to crush each other, at least for a time, and exchanged concessions on principle for the greater good of political stability. Though they preserved the union for decades, the Compromises were fatally tainted by slavery and thus could not stave off national breakdown.Prospects for durable compromise today are accordingly brighter -- assuming the election winners learn from the past 12 years' worth of partisan uniting and dividing.Charles Lane is a member of The Washington Post's editorial board.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
