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As President Obama spoke of the country’s deepening sense of alienation and anger last month, a teacher in Michigan listened, her eyes fixed on the stone-faced Republicans in the House chamber who in her view represented the problem.
“Let’s get over the party lines and work together!” she tweeted during the president’s State of the Union address.
In Maryland, a retired lawyer was listening to the exact same words. He, too, was worried about the anger and division gripping the country, but as Obama spoke, his resentment toward the president only swelled.
"Hearing him complain about political rancor is frankly nauseating,” he wrote.
The two tweets flashed across the Internet within seconds of each other, each in their own way capturing the country’s mood and the challenge facing the president in his final months in office — not simply a partisan divide, but a deep mistrust that has become so entrenched that it seems to affect the very way Americans hear the president’s words and see each other.
Part of the problems seem to be that people who identify with the two parties know little about each other - or themselves it seems. Add this to our discussion of political ignorance.
