++ Editor's Letter ++

++ Editor's Letter ++


11/12/2004

Four more years. The election is over, but the argument isn’t. For a short spell, there will be some earnest talk in Washington of healing and unity and bipartisanship. Just a wild guess here, but I suspect it won’t last. The electoral map tells the story: A solid swath of red sweeping from the West through the South, sandwiched by solid blue on the West Coast and in the Northeast, with a dab of blue in the urban Midwest. The red-blue divide is stark, and it’s real, and it’s deep, and it will continue to define us. Consider this: Bush’s approval ratings among registered Republicans have routinely exceeded 90 percent—higher than Ronald Reagan’s. The Republican base thinks Bush is a great president. Blue-staters, though, despise him: Among Democrats, Bush’s approval ratings have been 15 percent or less. That’s the largest partisan gap recorded in a half-century of modern polling.

In the dazed land of the blue, some of the vanquished, such as Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times, are calling for a truce. But the issues that divide the nation don’t lend themselves easily to compromise—abortion, gay marriage, the role of religion in public life, and the wisdom of the war in Iraq. Two competing worldviews are in collision. The last time we were this divided was during the Vietnam era, and before that, you have to go back to the Civil War. The scars of those schisms are with us still. So I suppose for a time we’ll have to make a stab at sanity and reasoned debate. Until, that is, the president tries to fill the first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

William Falk
Editor-in-Chief