When it comes to President Bush, you either love him or hate him - or so it seems, in this nation's highly charged political climate.

Americans may still feel under threat of terrorism, but for Bush, the political respite of 9/11 - the sky-high approval ratings born of strong support from voters of both parties - has ended.

By mid-September, Bush had matched President Reagan for the widest gap ever in job-approval rating between Republicans and Democrats, 86 percent vs. 16 percent, in the history of the Gallup poll. (Reagan hit the 70-point gap twice, late in 1984, as he ran for reelection.)

Bush's role as a polarizer continues where President Clinton left off. Clinton was, in his time, the most polarizing president to date, as was Reagan before him.

The first President Bush was less polarizing than the others, in part because he was more willing to go against party orthodoxy. He sometimes angered his own party and pleased the opposition, as with his decision to raise taxes after pledging that he would not.

And in that, there may be a lesson: Polarizers Reagan and Clinton both won reelection; the first President Bush did not. The additional lesson seems to be, keep your core voters happy and don't worry about compromising with the other party. On most issues, the current President Bush is doing just that.

"On the economy, tax cuts, the environment, issues that divide Democrats and Republicans, he's taken a hard-line Republican stance," says Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who has studied the partisan differences of presidential approval. One exception is education. But even the Iraq war is "turning into a partisan issue as well, which it wasn't initially," Professor Jacobson adds.

The Pew center's latest poll also shows a yawning gap in presidential approval, to the point where partisan views of the president are now "as strongly held as opinion of former President Clinton [was] at the height of the impeachment scandal," the center's report says.

As it did then, the return of intense partisanship at both the grass roots and elite levels bodes ill for Congress's ability to pass landmark legislation, such as a prescription drug law for seniors.

Other factors play into the polarizing nature of the times, including the longtime growth in "safe" congressional seats, which allows members to play to constituents of their own party and no one else. The decline in contested House seats has reached the point where only about 10 percent of that chamber's 435 seats are "in play" at election time.

Democrats, of course, also come in for their share of blame for the polarizing tone of the times - both on Capitol Hill and in the presidential campaign. In the Senate recently, two of the older members - Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska and Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia - went after each other over the war with a nastiness that was striking to observers of that traditionally collegial body. In the presidential race, the Democrats' sense that Bush is vulnerable has led many of the candidates to take their gloves off.

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