AP Photo

More evidence of our great American divide arrived last Friday in the form of some focus group studies undertaken by Stan Greenberg (Bill Clinton's pollster in 1992) and James Carville. They oversaw conversations with a group of hard-shell conservatives in Georgia. The fascinating results explain a lot about my country's political tensions and shed light on the question of what makes contemporary American conservatism "“ well, unique, let's call it.

They found that conservatives "stand a world apart from the rest of America" in terms of how they view Barack Obama and how they see politics. There is a continuum, in other words, in US politics, running from those on the left who've already concluded that Obama is a sellout, to mainstream liberals who are basically happy...