After 100 Days, Does Obama Beat Bush?

After 100 days, President Obama is more divisive, more popular with moderates, and bigger with his base than George W. Bush was at this point—depending on where you look, the Christian Science Monitor finds in a look at 11 community types. Overall, Obama’s 63% Pew approval rating beats Bush’s—but unlike Obama, Dubya was rated at least 59% in all communities studied.

Obama scores below 50% in “heavily-Latino” communities, just 50% in “Military bastions,” and 51% in “Evangelical epicenters.” But the president is soaring at 70% in “Monied ‘burbs,” full of rich, educated people, and at 69% in “Boom towns,” which are wealthy, “growing and diversifying.” Both are politically important communities. And in the “Industrial metropolis”—“what might be thought of as his base,” blogger Dante Chinni notes—Obama scores 82% approval.
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