The myth of the Red States

By way of background, there's some insider baseball to this topic's appearance here today:

Some of the top-tier blogs (not including your humble narrator--not yet) have been going around and around with one another for the last week or so, arguing the question:

Should Democrats try to get that last 2% (the difference between Kerry's 49% and Bush's 51%) by jumping on the moral values bandwagon, especially regarding upsetting images in the media (video games, movies, TV, you name it)?

Or should they do it by getting in touch with their libertarian strain (don't shove your religious values and practices down my throat, don't tell me what I'm allowed to read and watch, etc.)?

I've always been a believer that it's probably not a good idea to let the color scheme some technician happened to pick for the graphics on network election night coverage become the master metaphor for the state of the nation. So I've never really bought into the Red State/Blue State distinction.

I'm also a believer in letting people view and read what they want. If whatever-it-is is really, truly rotting their minds, it'll just make it easier to win over them in the next election, in the next business deal, the next job interview, etc.

The early rush to explain the unexpected surge for Bush on election day 2004 produced the "moral values" canard that has long outlived whatever whiff of explanatory value it once had: Abortion and violent crime were all down under Clinton, and have gone back up under Bush. (Good lord . . . what if the explanation of those phenomena has to do with economic class, and not moral values? The mind reels.) And today, divorce and viewership of "Desperate Housewives" are higher in the so-called Red States. "Moral values" was a handy tag to explain an unexpected outcome, and certainly one that the hard Right found it useful to exploit. But I don't think there's much "there" there.

But here's a breath of fresh air, from someone who clearly knows the so-called Red States a lot better than the pundits inside the Beltway.

Stay with it; it builds to a crescendo in the final third of the post. And follow the links in the post for any background you want. And as someone who spent most of his formative years caroming around the Midwest, I find it fits much closer with my social/ cultural experience than all that "Red State" talk.