LogFAQs > #969168838

Speaking of modern political history, I'd say the answer is probably George H.W. Bush. He was just socially conservative enough to be tolerable to the "family values" oriented Republicans, but he was much more fiscally liberal than Ronald Reagan, making him more popular with Democrats than other modern Republican Presidents. H.W. Bush expanded government spending, raised taxes despite campaign promises not to do so, signed legislation expanding civil rights protections for handicapped Americans, and also supported and signed the Clean Air Act adding new environmental protections to federal law. His handling of the Gulf War generally received bipartisan support, since he managed the affair relatively well and kept intervention in the Middle East very brief, though populist rightists and isolationists such as Pat Buchanan still opposed even this intervention. In the end, Bush was unable to win reelection because, while he was super offensive to virtually no one, he was too moderate to really rally all of the parts of the old Reagan coalition, and he failed to keep many former Reagan voters from defecting to Ross Perot, especially in the face of a challenge from Bill Clinton, a Democrat who was a much better candidate on the campaign trail than earlier politicians that party put forth (such as Michael Dukakis, George McGovern, and Hubert Humphrey).

Given Bush's failure to win reelection despite high popularity ratings, James Monroe might be the true answer to this question, since he presided over the Era of Good Feelings and received virtually unanimous support from every region of the country. The two party system disappeared during his Presidency, since Federalists felt that they got enough of what they wanted from his administration to lose their reason to exist, whereas the Republicans still felt that he spoke to their beliefs and feelings on the major issues of the day. It's impossible to imagine any President receiving a near unanimous vote in the Electoral College today, in the way that Monroe did. There are reasons that the Era of Good Feelings is overrated, and we already saw a few fissures within Monroe's administration that prefigured the rise of the Jacksonian Party System, but the 1820s in general was probably a low-point in terms of partisan polarization, especially when compared with the eras that preceded it and that followed it thereafter.

Obama is definitely not a good answer here. He was considerably more liberal than Bill Clinton was as President, and he never gave conservative voters any reason to be happy with him at all. In fact, Obama helped contribute to the radically polarized political atmosphere that we have found ourselves in many ways.