Jason Sattler

As Barack Obama rounds the corner toward his last days in the Oval Office, America is getting downright clingy about our 44th president.

The Clinton surrogate in chief's approval rating — which been consistently above 50% for most of this year — hit an almost balmy 57% in the Gallup daily tracking poll last week. That percentage quickly slipped a bit, but he is still the most popular active U.S. politician who isn’t his wife or Bernie Sanders.

Yet Gallup also finds that only three out of 10 Americans think their nation is on the “right track.”

How could a country that thinks we’re going so wrong think our president is doing so right?

The answer is that the “right track/wrong direction” polling number has stopped measuring any useful sentiment, if it ever did.

Instead, this question now gives voters a chance to vent their frustration at everything they hate about politics — from the unprecedented strategy to obstruct to the point of paralysis born on Obama's Inauguration Day, to the never-ending campaigning on both sides that has largely eclipsed governing.

Most of all, the "wrong direction" poll number has become a leading indicator of nation so polarized that a tangerine-hued professional famous person, whose only foreign policy experience is outsourcing his products and marrying imported wives, ended up winning a major-party presidential nomination.

Pollster Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School Poll notes that “right track/wrong direction” answer “largely mirrors presidential approval” until we hit the era of Obama.

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Both Democrats and Republicans tend to believe the country is less likely to be speeding toward a tunnel painted on the side of a mountain when a member of their own party is flying around in Air Force One. But throughout Obama’s presidency, the percentage of Republicans who say we’re on the right track has been mired below 20%.

Nothing cheers them up. Not scraping our way out of a near depression. Not getting Osama bin Laden. Not getting the unemployment rate below 6% or seeing gas prices hovering around $2 a gallon — big promises of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in their respective 2012 presidential campaigns.

Not even unemployment claims near 40-year lows, which means layoffs per capita are about as low as we’ve ever recorded, has put any pep in the Republican step.

Is this typical cognitive dissonance — like how Americans generally approve of their member of Congress but find the entire institution about as savory as a smoothie made from a full diaper — or does the rise of Trump suggest there’s something more dangerous going on?

The conservative entertainment news complex has constructed an alternative reality so all-encompassing that the chance of conservatives happening on any sort of good news is virtually nil. Hosts teach their viewers how to debunk anything Democrats might claim as an accomplishment and make sure they believe six terrible things about Obama before breakfast.

Watch out for rampant crime! Take cover from the massive immigration problem! Fear the dangers Obama unleashed by unleashing Black Lives Matter and his ISIL buddies on the police!

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Stay outraged enough and you’ll never have to face the reality that crime, undocumented immigration and police killings are all near generational, if not historic, lows. Spend seven years in an outrage cocoon and you may start to believe that the birther who doesn’t pay his bills, and learns history by hiring people to print out the comment sections of right-wing blogs, is the only person who can get back all the guns Obama took.

Of course, Democrats craft their own convenient reality, too. Few are talking about the new wars in Syria or Yemen that we’ve drifted into without even a pretense of a debate. Obamacare has been a huge success for more than 20 million uninsured, but there are serious problems of escalating premiums for about 3% of Americans who buy coverage in the marketplace without subsidies.

But liberals tend to show enough tolerance for reality that they haven’t actually nominated a reality star for president. The Republican “bubble,” as Bill Maher has called it on his show for the liberal bubble, is like a gerrymandered congressional district — designed to seal you from any reasonable opposition.

Josh Barro of Business Insider suggests that “lying has been the most effective way to promote many of the policies favored by donor-class conservatives, and so they built an apparatus to invent and spread the best lies.” There’s not a huge leap from suggesting tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves to claiming Mexico fills buses with criminals to send them down the NAFTA superhighway into your kid’s school.

For the country to agree on the right direction, we actually need some shared sense of reality. Because, as we learned the hard way in 2016, if you don’t trust the “liberal media” or anyone to debunk lies, you just end up with the best liar.

Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memoand the answer to the obscure trivia question, "Who's the guy who tweets as @LOLGOP?"

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