WASHINGTON – One of the puzzling questions about Barack Obama’s presidency is how the post-partisan candidate of 2008 became the polarizing chief executive of 2010.

The answer may be surprising: He was far more polarizing from the start than many recognized. His choices in office and his opponents’ responses have only hardened that divide.

During the campaign, candidate Obama talked about the need to put the partisan divisions of the past behind. His victory fostered discussion about whether the country had turned a corner after years of bitter partisanship. In the glow of his inauguration, some people heralded a new era in American politics.

Such notions appear badly off the mark at this point in his presidency. A closer look at the time would have rendered such conclusions questionable at best. Equally questionable was the expectation that he could break the grip of partisan polarization in the country.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a number of scholars who have undertaken an early examination of the Obama presidency and whose work was presented at this weekend’s meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Voters not unified

As Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego, put it: “Americans were polarized from the start in their opinions of Obama and his agenda. The outline of the current configuration of political attitudes was plainly visible during the 2008 campaign.”

Obama won almost 53 percent of the vote, the most by any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He won red states Democrats had not won in decades. But there was less unifying shape to the results than some broad-brush measures suggested.

George Edwards of Texas A&M University notes that the number of states that deviated significantly from the national vote was more than in any election in 60 years, including 14 that went for Republican John McCain.

“Never before had many of these states voted so heavily against a victorious Democrat,” Edwards writes, citing the work of others.

Jacobson notes that Obama’s coalition included one of the smallest shares of voters who identified with the opposing party on record. He won because of “unusually high turnout among Democrats” and the fact that the Republican Party had shrunk during President George W. Bush’s second term.

Clashing priorities

Views of Obama as a leftist, as an extremist, as a would-be socialist, as dishonest – all of which became commonplace among some tea party activists and other conservative opponents once he was in office – were implanted during the campaign against McCain.

“A large proportion of voters on the losing side in 2008 … had by election day come to regard Obama as the McCain-Palin campaign had portrayed him: as an untrustworthy leftist radical with a socialist agenda,” Jacobson writes. “There was also an undertone of racial animosity.”

But Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia and Jesse Rhodes of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst highlight how tensions between Obama’s post-partisan instincts clashed with his commitment to “traditional Democratic priorities.”

Obama has frustrated liberals in his own party by trying to reach out to Republicans while angering Republicans by pressing an agenda that was anathema to conservatives.

“Consequently, even as the president scored major policy victories, he neither transcended partisanship nor fully satisfied members of his own party,” they write. “More damaging to the president, his attempt to both transcend parties and rally the Democratic base led the public to question his leadership and a steady decline in approval ratings.”

Rhetorical question

Several scholars took issue with Obama’s rhetorical effectiveness. By winning the Iowa caucuses, “he became evidence of his own message” of hope and change, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The result of the campaign was that he created expectations for his ability to move people through words that were virtually impossible to meet.

Edwards asserts that Obama and his advisers may have believed he had greater gifts of persuasion than are truly possible in any president, especially one who serves in a time of polarized politics. Obama would have been better off trying to assess what the public was prepared to accept, rather than to have acted in ways that assumed he could change it.