What are Tim Russert's Red or Blue States?
2008 Presidential Election Was an American Ideological Shift
Nov 8, 2008
The 2008 Presidential Election, historical in many ways, will also be remembered as the election that began an ideological change in America. Receiving 68% of the electoral votes (364) and 52.5% of the popular vote, president elect Barack Obama is the first Democrat to win a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976. However, remarkable this was something more profound happened. A fundamental dogma of the nation is changing. The American paradigm is occurring nationwide.
The Civil War Revisited, Red vs. Blue!
Used almost daily during the 2008 American election season, the terms, regionally coined in 2000 by the late anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, had newscasters ignore the past and hidden racial undertones of these phrases. Originating from the time of the civil war, the terms imply national division based upon ideology. Today, the division is primarily seen as political and regional; however, it still implies a fundamental philosophical difference. Red states have blue thinking citizens and vice-a-versa; yet, in large pockets of the nation it also represents the segregationist hatred of its long and violent history.
Historian and reporter Rob Williams wrote in the Vermont Commons, “All of the states that permitted slavery and the [three] western territories where it was not outlawed (Kansas, Nebraska, and Utah), voted red… The states and territories where slavery was illegal…voted blue, with the exception of the eastern part of the Washington and Oregon territories (which became Idaho). Can there be some lingering connection?”
Red States – the term has deep roots in American history that came about at that horrible time, the Civil War, when a confederate state, a red state, was also a Slave state.
- The Battle flag, Stars and Bars and the Stainless Banner defined the flags of the Confederacy during the South’s secession from the Union. Primarily red in color, they stood for the ideology of the secessionists. Major Arthur L. Rogers, designer of the 3rd Confederate flag said the design had "as little as possible of the Yankee blue."
- Morehead University critical thinking Professor Ric Caric quoted on 10/17/07 an excerpt of slave William Moore’s accounts. Moore wrote, “Marse Tom…had a big bullwhip and he stake a nigger on the ground…and whip the nigger until the blood run out and red up the ground.” Southern soil (now termed states) ran red with ideological blood.
- While the uniforms of the Confederacy were gray and many refer to the conflict as the “blue and gray” war, the South was (and still is) considered conservative. Walter Cisco quoted Wade Hampton in his book, Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman, “…conservatives throughout the South had united…only to be disappointed.”
Blue States – the Free states too came about naturally in response to the War Between the States. Richard Rollins in his book The Damned Red Flags of the Rebellion": The Confederate Battle Flag at Gettysburg said, “The Confederate flags incorporated the language of color…into a…highly visible representation of the differences between North and South.”
- The most noticeable item on the American flag is the white stars on a blue background in the portion of the flag called the union. Also the Union of the United States was what the Confederacy wished to succeed from during the civil war and by separating from the blue union of the flag; the South was surreptitiously separating from the symbol of the flag.
- The main color of the uniform of the northern army was blue. Confederate soldiers referred to the soldiers, derogatorily as Blue Bellies.
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