Speaking of racist, interesting article in the Daily Beast about the new racial cold war in America. The states which swing Republican this election were also, coincidentally, the states that supported slavery in the Civil War (and vice versa).
The GOP's Geography And The Confederacy
I made a point on ABC News' This Week this morning that George Will described as "empirically false." Here's the clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qhO9T-XXDyM#!
I made the following claim: that if Virginia and Florida and North Carolina flip back to the GOP from Obama this November, as now looks likely, Romney will have won every state in the Confederacy.
And if you look at the current electoral map without toss-up states, and only the states that were in existence in 1861, you get this comparison:
Here's the map of the states in 1861, colored for their position on slavery:
Are you not struck by the similarities? (The yellow states were not part of the Confederacy but backed slavery. Kansas is an exception, and Maryland and Delaware along the border too). I am not saying (and in the conversation it's a little garbled and I can see why Heroge might have interpreted me as saying) that that the only states that will switch from Obama to Romney this year were Confederate states. Indiana is the exception. I was saying that if Obama loses North Carolina, Virginia and Florida - which I suspect he will - then the 2012 map will more closely resemble the civil war map than 2008, when the same pattern was striking.
I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.
I find it troubling - and interesting.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/the-gops-geography-and-the-confederacy.html
Topic: USA politics Low Content Thread