Record-setting partisan divide

While campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama said he would "turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington" and pass a bipartisan agenda in Congress.

Instead, Congress set records last year for just how polarized it has become.

One way to measure the partisanship by looking at how many partisan votes -- votes where majorities from each party in the House and Senate vote against each other -- have taken place during the most recent congressional session. Since 1953, Congressional Quarterly has tracked those votes, and its tallies show extreme levels of partisanship.

The House, led by a Republican majority that includes a slate of tea party members elected for the first time in 2010, set a record for the frequency of these party-line votes.

The Senate, where Democrats were in charge, held far fewer partisan votes, but the average Democratic senator fell in line with his or her party's majority more than any time in the last five decades -- another record.

Not only isn't Congress passing a bipartisan agenda, it isn't passing any comprehensive agenda, said James Muirhead, Jr., a political science professor at Dartmouth University.

So far, the current Congress has passed 61 bills into law, putting it on pace to be the least productive since 1947, according to an analysis by USA Today.

The parties have found common ground on "small bore things," such as reforming the Food and Drug Administration and reaching a free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, said James Thurber, a presidential scholar at American University and author of the book Obama in Office.

But those measures have been overshadowed by contentious fights over the federal budget.

It's not clear how much Obama tried to engender a bipartisan mood in Washington.

"I don't think Obama ever brought the Republicans up to the White House in the way that (President Bill Clinton) would," said Sean Theriault, a political scientist from University of Texas at Austin. "It's unlikely it would have helped, but he didn't try as hard as he could have."

For proof that Obama made an effort, supporters point to tax cuts in his economic stimulus package, a proposal for universal health care originally conceived by conservatives and the appointments of Republicans as his secretaries of transportation and defense.

But by and large, his stimulus package and health care reforms ran against the ideological grain of mainstream conservatism, and the vast majority of his department heads are Democrats.

Political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who work for moderate left and right-leaning research institutes, say the stalemate in Congress is the Republicans' fault. They published a book in April about unprecedented polarization in Congress called "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism."

"It was a conscious decision not to cooperate (with Obama) no matter what," Norman Ornstein said in an interview. "It's not clear to me there was a whole lot he could have done otherwise."

Here at the Obameter, though, we measure outcomes, not intentions. Obama said he would "bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda." That hasn't happened. We rate this Promise Broken.