Where have you gone, Ed Murrow, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

A March 2nd, Pew Research Center study concluded:

For all of his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades.

The partisan gap by their measurement has been growing wider as each president has taken office. But they don't seem to focus on what seems to me the real finding of the study: Democrats are far more willing to give a new Republican president a chance than are Republicans supportive of a new Democratic president. Only 27% of Republicans (in the polls) approve of the job Obama is doing and 26% of Republicans supported President Clinton at a similar point in his presidency, while a full 36% of Democrats gave their support to W. Bush, despite one of the most controversial elections in U.S. history. Daddy Bush, in 1989, won approval from 41% of Democrats. 41% of Democrats backed Reagan, 56% of Republicans supported Carter and in 1969, 55% of Democrats approved of the job Nixon was doing. So you can see how much more partisan Republicans are than Democrats in recent post-election periods.

Whet strikes me is the imbalance between the utterly moderate social change that Obama wants to bring about and the out-of-control response of the Republicans. Try this on for size: Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, told a Birmingham paper that there were 17 socialists in Congress. I don't know if he was holding a piece of paper in his hand at the time. But it is striking that the best the Republicans can do at this moment is to reproduce one of the worst periods in U.S. history - the McCarthy era. What scares me more than the echoes of McCarthyism is the absence of a towering media figure like Edward R. Murrow to challenge these McCarthyites head on. There is no one of Murrow's stature today who would jeopardize his or her career to bring Bachus-like Republicans to heel. Unfortunately, the most visible figures in today's corporate media are handmaidens to wealth and power.

(I should just point out that I realize that Murrow didn't by himself bring down McCarthy. There many brave people who stood up to the prevailing right-wing winds, some of whom went to prison rather than testify before the Senate or House committees. But it often takes someone like Murrow to put the nail in the coffin of injustice.)