Election response #4

From Scott Rosenberg:

“What’s disturbing is how clearly split the country is geographically. The red/blue split first noticed in 2000 looks less like an anomaly of a tight election and more like a long-term alignment of the American people: The coasts, the Northeast, the Midwest — almost anywhere that people are gathered in big cities — for the Democrats; the West and the South for the Republicans. The last time the nation faced this kind of split, in the mid-19th century, we ended up shooting one another. I don’t think we face an actual civil war this time around, thankfully, but we do face something like its cultural and political equivalent.

So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end. Richard Nixon won a gigantic landslide in 1972 and was out of office two years later. Ronald Reagan swept the board in 1984 but we survived and regrouped and recaptured the White House in the 90s.

The good news is that the country’s split still leaves the Democrats within a stone’s throw of winning an election. The bad news is, we couldn’t win it — even with a stagnant economy and Americans dying abroad in an ill-conceived war. Now the important thing to do is figure out why, and learn from our mistakes.”