Unfortunately, Barack Obama was wrong when he blamed pundits for trying “to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states.
“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America,” the future 44th president contended at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, seeking to make a case that unifying attitudes often transcended partisan lines.
The premise and the promise of that speech helped create the career that four years later took Obama to the White House. But it likely wasn’t true then, and it certainly isn’t true now, as a country already split electorally has shown those divisions reflected in more and more areas of national life.
The chasm between Democrats and Republicans over how best to fight the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic is endangering the nation’s well-being as perhaps nothing since divisions over slavery split the union and caused the Civil War.
In recent weeks, COVID has surged in states where prominent Republican governors have led the resistance to the stricter measures like mandating vaccinations and masks that most medical experts recommend as the best way to fight the pandemic.