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Although American politics depends on partisan rivalry, typically partisans are able to distinguish dislike for aro president's policies and politics from hatred for the individual. Yet some presidents provoke unabashed antipathy that cannot be explained merely by policy differences within a partisan arena. How do these powerful emotions arise? To explain this animus, we argue that it is not their actions while president but the way that the despised president comes to typify, issues of the period in which a previous political generation was imprinted. Presidential hatred is involved in generational politics and is grounded in the cultural past rather than the political present. We argue that the controversial reputations of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were grounded in debates over American politics of the late 1940s and the late 1960s. In the case of Nixon and Clinton, we suggest that hatred facilitates scandal rather than scandal causing hatred.
The American political system depends on partisanship. Our parties are organized to engage in rivalrous battle against each other to attract the support of a public that can be fickle in its choices and ambivalent in its affiliation. Within the American context this political strife has a compelling force because of the institutionalization of a two-party system. We find not only rivalry at any one time but a tradition of rivalry that is embedded within a historical context in which the two parties-the Democrats and the Republicans-have been contending for nearly 150 years.
This recognition of competitive contention between two groups does not deny the existence of occasional third parties, including some that have received significant proportions of the vote, such as George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968 with 46 electoral votes and 14% of the popular vote or Ross Perot's Reform Party with 19% of the vote in 1992.
In this article, we analyze a largely unexplored feature of this political battle. We wish to explain how some presidents come to be despised by significant segments of the American electorate. By this, we are not referring to national approval ratings. Job performance approval ratings often fluctuate wildly, and some presidents-William Jefferson Clinton comes readily to mind-can receive generally high marks from the public while still generating virulent hostility from some quarters of his...