has there ever been a president more divisive than obama? Can't think of any.
That you cannot think of any is no surprise insofar as it's not readily apparent that you put much effort of any sort into thinking.
has there ever been a president more divisive than obama? Can't think of any.
As goes the question you posed:
- One cannot at once claim Obama is the most divisive POTUS ever when the fact is that disdain for him, more that much else, is what unified the GOP enough to garner Trump an election win, and even that was achieved only by the slimmest of margins that result from a consequence of the electoral college and the fact that nearly all states apportion electors using not a proportionality model but rather a "winner take all" model, not by dint of an absolute majority of voters having voted for him.
- One cannot claim that Obama is the most divisive POTUS ever and expect that claim to be taken as legitimate by any other than inveterate partisans of the GOP. The reason that one cannot expect that is because for such a claim to be credible, one must also make a strong case that were a different Democrat to have won the 2008 and 2012 elections, say HIllary Clinton of whom John McCain in 2013 said, "Her work as secretary of state, with the exception of this issue of Benghazi -- which isn’t going away -- I think has been outstanding," would the divisiveness that suffuses the GOP electorate, thus the nation, be absent or materially diminished? Was the divisiveness attenuated during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the man they voted to impeach, the man they accused of murder, rape and drug-running? Would it have disappeared or abated had Kerry or Sanders become POTUS? I don't know the answers to those questions, but I know one must have sound and cogent answers to them in order for the claim you've made to be credible, and you've presented not merely weak answers to them, but also no answers to those questions.
- Looking at the discord and disunity within the GOP, both before and after Trump's election, how can Obama have been the cause of that? For instance, whatever divisiveness Obama may have caused is not to blame for the GOP's failure to repeal and replace O-care, a theme GOP federal, state and local candidates ran on for, what, six years.
Republicans during Obama's tenure hated their own leaders. To wit, they chased John Boehner out of the House, in part due to House Republican's utter refusal to countenance compromise of any sort. Mitch McConnell's approval rating in Kentucky among Republicans is 18%, and even before the Trump era, it hovered in the 15% to 20% range. Is Obama to blame for Republican Kentuckians repeatedly sending to the U.S. Senate a man whom, by and large, they detest? The answer is clearly "no."
- Imagine the GOP of today as a party not animated by the rhetoric of fear, loathing and antipathy. Quite simply, such a GOP is not imaginable for without those levers, the GOP would not be the GOP we presently see. The talk radio industry, the conservative websites, the faux “Tea Party” pressure groups constantly begging conservatives for donations so they can fend off the pending collapse of Western civilization for one more day -- the entire conservative infrastructure relies on divisiveness as its mother’s milk.
Indeed, and ironically, the existence and contrivances of the "Tea Party" as a material cohort within the GOP are themselves manifestations of Republican predilection for and predisposition to being more about what they can oppose than what they can accomplish by their own devices; "Tea Party" Republicans are the very architects of discord. "Why" isn't really important because the fact is that they are more focused on sundering things than on creating things, not the least of things being national harmony in general and sound public policy in particular.
The above is just the tip of the iceberg of qualitative analysis of the question with regard to the GOP and the consequences of how it's evolved. There is also the matter of objective analysis of the matter of Obama's alleged-by-Republicans being the most divisive POTUS in history.
Immediately anyone who thinks -- remember I wrote that it's not apparent that you put any effort into doing that -- about the matter recalls that
Lincoln's election to the presidency was the main impetus for South Carolina's secession, and we all know where that led. Lincoln's mere assumption of the office catalyzing a state's secession is markedly more divisive than anything Obama did.
One need not, however, constrain the analysis to POTUSes from long ago. The fact of the matter is that according to Gallup's tracking of the extent of polarization among the electorate, Bush II holds that dubious honor, though it's likely that Trump will take it from him. (The Gallup data are for full years.)
So to return to my original claim that it's not evident that you bother to think at all, readers who are somewhat aware of the "talking points" the GOP utter will notice that even the notion that Obama be the most divisive president ever isn't a thought you conjured, but rather that you have merely parroted that idea. Furthermore, from reading the above remarks readers will observe that you didn't think to perform so much as even the most cursory investigation to find out whether Obama is, by objective measurement, to say nothing of qualitatively so, the most divisive POTUS ever. In doing those two things, neither of which evinces the barest vestiges of extant thought activity, you've made it patently clear that you are not part of "we the people," but rather that you are a card carrying member of the genre of humanity called "sheeple," the very epitome of insentient humans.
