by Barack Obama turned the world Blue. Red Republicans claim there is no Obama mandate, but we who won the world — know the United States is forever changed — but how can we semiotically prove the provenance of the Blue Mandate?
Enter SuperGenius Mark Newman, University of Michigan physics professor, as he puts the Blue and Red states in perspective.
Here is the standard map of the USA, post-presidential election. Looking merely at the territory of geography, one would think the Red States are almost overwhelming the Blue States and that Obama’s win wasn’t that big or historic.
However, when Professor Newman remakes the map, scaling for population this time — there’s a reason California has 55 electoral college votes and Nebraska only has five — you can see the overwhelming wash of Blue across the entire nation from coast-to-coast.
Barack Blue is People, people! PEEE-PLE!
Barack Obama has a mandate — and he’d better use that overwhelming vote of good faith we placed in him — or he risks losing the hope of our “righteous wind.”
Frank Rich provides more context for the Obama Mandate:
The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left?
The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.
The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.
Perhaps, in the end, Blue and Red don’t really matter — and purple shall rule us all — but as of November 4, 2008, there is no denying the new Barack is Blue.
David —
Great graphic to put the mumbling to rest! It seems Obama has won hearts and minds everywhere but middle America. Is there a possible explanation for this?
I love the new map of the US – makes it seem more like the US in which I live rather than the US of the long eight lean years of Bush.
That’s a very good question, Dananjay. Obama won much more of the Midwest than any other president before him in modern times — even even grabbed a single electoral vote in Omaha, Nebraska for the first time in history!
What the map shows me is that the South is still a giant glob of scared backwardness and the threat to the future of the Republican party is that they become the “Dixiecrat” party of rednecks, gun owners and Christian fundamentalists led by Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee.
People in those Red States do not like change. They do not like foreigners. They do not appreciate various viewpoints. They want one thing. They want that one thing forever. They believe in faith and not science.
Me, too, Gordon! It was an overwhelming mandate with the sides of the USA squishing in on the middle and the South.
The good thing about the Blue Wave is that the Republicans will have to get nicer and kinder and more liberal if they ever hope to win the middle again.
Hi David,
It was mesmerizing to watch the Midwest getting flooded by “Blue”.
Waiting to to see the entire map getting painted the same way by Obama.
It will be an amazing thing, Katha, to see the Blue States back up Obama’s mandate. He must be proactive, though. He cannot drift to the middle just to get along with the losers. He has 2 years to do whatever he wants and he needs to push it.
Yes, David, that seems likely. The more they get marginalized the more they’ll embrace fundamentalist thought and faith-based leadership.
That’s the danger of it, Dananjay — and that’s good for the Blue of Us — because that means the Republicans will get even meaner and stay in the woods of their own forest.
The danger to the Blue of Us, though, is that they come out of their Southern funk and find a new, Northern, progressive that believes in getting out of our personal lives and leaving people a lone — that would sell well, I think.
Palin isn’t going anywhere. She’s the new leader of the losers. Watch.
I think you’re right about that, Anne. At least in 2010, the Republicans will go even harder and meaner than they did in 2008 and it will blow up in their faces. Then, for 2012, the next wave of kinder, gentler, Republicans will return to rule the world.