Al Hunt offers a nice round-up of the conventional wisdom in his WSJ column. The only thing that bugs me is that he starts from the premise that because partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats are deeply split — pro vs. con, obviously — on George W. Bush that therefore Bush must be a deeply polarizing figure. There are a whole bundle of assumptions behind this very common thinking. First, it assumes that the country would be better off if the President always split the difference between black and white. Second, it assumes that this is somehow surprising or unnatural in a country evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. There is this bizarre notion that saw full flower during the McCain boomlet that “indepedent” thinking — i.e. a little conservative, a little liberal, some Democrat, some Republican — is somehow more intellectually honest than being all on one side of the issue or the other. Of course, some issues are more complicated than the party lines sometimes suggest, but there’s no reason to believe that simply shmushing (not a word, but you get me) together the two “extreme” positions is any less simple-minded.