Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Red/Blue Redux

I see that everyone who is anyone is blogging about Sasha Issenberg's "refutation" of David Brooks's "One Nation, Slightly Divisible".

It seems a lot like breaking two butterflies on the wheel. It's hard to believe that anyone takes Brooks's heavily embellished stereotypes as serious reporting. Issenberg finds it easy to demolish some of his factual assertions, yet at other times s/he handles the data clumsily. (E.g. statewide data does not necessarily tell us anything about a specific county.) Neither reporter did a very good job of reporting when it came to the big question-- how different are red and blue America?

As an aside-- it would be interesting if a magazine like The Atlantic did a reverse Brooks. Send a "Red America writer" to do a red/blue comparison.

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