On the road to the 2004 election (Red|Blue America)

[ZenLefty]

I'm not much of a fan of this columnist, but this article looks like an interesting read nonetheless. This is the first installment of a five part series.

On the road to the 2004 election

You don't need a map to find America's political divide

July 17, 2004



...

The charge is at the very heart of the nation's red-blue divide — which, depending on your reading, is either a grass-roots culture war, an invention of the liberal political class, all Rush Limbaugh's fault or not really a war at all. In any case, it's a divide that has left us a 48-48 country with so few undecideds that the pollsters know them, and their children, by name.

You don't have to trust me on this. Look at any poll. I'll pull out the one from the Pew Research Center on the 2004 political landscape, headlined: "Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized." If that's too subtle for you, the report makes the point that since the 50-50 Bush-Gore election, we've had a recession, a significant business scandal, the 9-11 cataclysm and two wars, and yet we remain, through all the ground shocks, a 50-50 country.

Need more? Here's Matthew Dowd, the president's pollster and strategist, in the L.A. Times: "You've got 80 to 90 percent of the country that looks at each other like they're on separate planets."

...

[ixion]

1. looks at each other like they're on separate planets

...problem is, we're all on the same planet.

We will never all think the same.

The best thing we can do is to try and let people believe what they want, and live the way they want, as long as they don't hurt someone else.
But I guess that would be too simple. :eyes:

I think everyone has the right to believe what they want...the problem is that they always want everyone else to believe it, too. :-(