These evil republicans may live closer than you think
It's interesting to see how many people in New York City view those "aliens" who voted for Bush. In this NYT article, quite a few people have an attitude indicating it's not only the president who has work to do to unite the country.
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.
However, probably unknown to most of those urbanites, they don't have to go to the midwest to find Bush majorities. Look at the voting map for New York state. Yes, most of NY is Bush country!
The people just an hour from NYC, living in the suburb and hardly being less "proficient and competitive" than those downtown, are obviously beyond the radar screen of the people who voted overwhelmingly for Kerry in Manhattan or Bronx and can't even imagine what those people were thinking. Naturally, the suburbian Bush majorities were offset by the vastly higher population density in the city itself, thus the state went decisively, but hardly overwhelmingly, to Kerry by 58-40.
PS: When you look at upstate NY and spot Kerry majorities, you have probably found a county with a major university or college.
PS 2: In Norway, the situation is typically the opposite. The cities tend to vote more conservative than the countryside and the smaller towns. And just to make the confusion complete for all of us, we refer to the leftists as red and the rightist-leaning parties as blue.
12:46:07 AM 
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