Yes, it’s true. And it’s research done at a university with strong lefty credentials, so it’s got to be true, right? The University of Michigan’s national election study uses a 1-100 thermometer to gauge people’s love (a high number) or hate (a low number) for public figures. In today’s divided political landscape, conservatives and liberals give each other pretty much the same thermometer readings, within a point of each other, with liberals hating conservatives a bit more than conservatives hate liberals, if you can believe the survey.

In 2004, the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” did have a fairly low opinion of liberals — they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are “extremely conservative” or “extremely liberal,” the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

So, conservatives aren’t the haters libs make them out to be, maybe even less so than liberals. But what about the so-called Bush Derangement Syndrome? Does it exist? You betcha:

[T]hose on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

But here’s the clincher emphasis added:

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

(Link via Michelle Malkin)