Election spotlights U.S. schism

The map showed a sea of red with islands and shoals of blue. Election Day 2004 revealed two Americas — deep differences dividing the 55 million citizens who cast their votes for John Kerry, and the 59 million who just as passionately selected George W. Bush.

The gulf is much greater than questions of what to do in Iraq or how to improve the economy. So great that a wife who voted for Kerry slept at her office rather than at home with a husband who celebrated Bush's win. So great that friends canceled a postelection coffee klatch because they couldn't sit at the same table and hear each other's opinions.

So great that Richard Unger was outright mocked when he told a longtime chum that he voted for Kerry.

"She looked at me like I was an idiot," the software designer says. "And then she started making fun of me. Now, she's a very nice lady. But in my head I was thinking, 'Why are you treating me this way simply because I chose a candidate?' "

This, as the two sat at a school basketball game in the suburbs of Pittsburgh — rooting for the same team.

Blues don't simply disagree with reds, and vice versa. Increasingly, it seems, each side sees the other as just plain wrong. Not like us. Impossible to be around. They use words like "scary" to describe one another's vision of tomorrow — and one another.

The candidates each talk of healing now, of the need to bridge the divides that separate Americans. But how, if compromise would mean moral surrender? Where do we begin, if we can hardly stand to look at each other?

"This has been way too hard-fought a campaign for us immediately to begin hugging," says the Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister and president of the left-leaning Interfaith Alliance. "There are huge rifts. It's raw emotions, anger, disappointment.

"It's far more than red and blue states."

Diverging views

"How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" screamed the day-after headline of one liberal British newspaper.

At a bar in Cleveland, the election said and done, tax clerk Bob O'Malley ponders the same question. A Kerry-Edwards button still clipped to his shirt, he bemoans what he sees as the takeover of America by "far right-wing evangelists."

"I think we're a country of morons," he grumbles. "We're more worried about two guys getting it on together than we are about losing our jobs. We've lost more jobs here in Ohio than any other state in the nation. And yet Ohio voted for Bush!

"It bothers me," he says, "a whole lot."

What O'Malley decries Jack Miller lauds as "a step in the right direction for America."