The man has a gift for divisiveness. After a disastrous loss in Puerto Rico, helped along by his English-as-a-first-language gaffe, the not-Romney candidate is in Illinois stirring another class warfare pot.
Santorum is telling crowds to “look at the map of the United States. Blue being the Democrats, red being the Republicans--it’s almost all red. Except around the big cities. And yet when you look at the economic plan that Republicans put forward, it’s all about tax breaks for higher-income individuals who live in those blue areas mostly.”
His campaigning is clearly aimed at what used to be called the redneck vote to pitchfork their resentments not only against Democrats but to elicit booing of “pundits” who say “we’ve got to elect someone who’s more moderate, someone who can appeal to moderates and independents in New York City and Los Angeles on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms.”
His strategy of winning sparsely populated areas against crowded cities is dubious in the face of polling that shows him losing by 45 to 30 percent in the crucial Illinois primary.
If Romney can seal that deal tomorrow, we may be on the way to seeing the last of a candidate who even Sarah Palin has suggested is a ”knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.”
Is there such a thing as a map of the US with the area of given entities -- counties, congressional districts, or states -- distorted to be proportional to the population of that entity? I've seen such maps for the world -- fat China and India, skinny South America, Australia a fingernail -- but not for just the USA. Of course that's the kind of red/blue comparison Santorum should be showing.
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