One of the most important questions confronting Barack Obama is how he will be treated by Republicans in Congress and the electorate after the afterglow of his victory fades.

During the campaign, John McCain riled up the base to think that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer who “doesn’t put country first.” McCain tried to back away from that position during his concession speech, which was generous and conciliatory, but ended up having to quiet his supporters, who booed Obama. The mood at GOP campaign rallies this fall suggests that McCain unleashed something he could not control.

As Kevin Drum wrote during the campaign, “[t]he danger is that John McCain is setting us up for a repeat of the 90s” in which conservatives “treat President Obama as not just an opposition leader, but as a virtual enemy of the state, as they did with Bill Clinton.” Paul Krugman expressed similar fears and predicted that the treatment of Obama “will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years.”

To understand what happened to Clinton, it’s important to note that he came into office with relatively low approval among opposition party identifiers compared with other presidents in the contemporary era:

Partly as a result, Clinton never had a presidential “honeymoon,” Republicans in Congress sought to undermine his agenda from the beginning (especially health care), and incessantly promoted scandal allegations like the Whitewater affair.

Will the Republican base and conservatives in Congress follow McCain’s lead in their treatment of Obama? It’s an important question with implications that seem to generalize beyond Clinton. For instance, my research on presidential scandal suggests that low opposition approval is an important predictor of increased presidential vulnerability to scandal in the contemporary era (1977-2006).

The evidence we have thus far suggests that Obama may face a similarly hostile GOP (though it’s obviously very early). First, there is a hardcore group of conservatives who strongly dislike Obama and are unlikely to view his administration with an open mind. A post-election USA Today/Gallup poll found that 27% of Americans and 56% of McCain voters are “afraid” as a result of Obama’s election — a response that is directly consistent with McCain’s campaign rhetoric. Similarly, 26% of Americans were found to strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance as president-elect in a Rasmussen Reports poll (though he hasn’t even taken office yet!).

The outrage machine is likely to start ginning up these voters very soon. This is the banner ad that I saw on Drudge the day after the election:

And here’s one I saw today:

The forces in contemporary politics that push us toward hyper-partisan confrontation from day one are very, very strong. Obama may be their next victim.

Update 11/10 9:39 AM: Here’s a similar poll result from Gallup, which finds that Obama’s favorability ratings are currently 70% favorable, 25% unfavorable, which is up from 61% favorable in the Nov. 1-3 poll. The question is how soon the Republicans and GOP-leaning independents will shift into negative views of Obama, which will largely depend on how soon conservative elites start criticizing him. He does start from a strong position — Gallup notes that the 61% favorable rating was the highest for a presidential candidate in the 1992-2008 period.