It Begins

Remember, America -- just because you voted for Barack Obama in 2008, that doesn't not make you a racist if you vote against him in 2012 (double negative intended)...

During this Sunday’s edition of ABC’s This Week, Daily Beast writer Andrew Sullivan claimed that if Republican nominee Mitt Romney wins back Florida and Virginia in the upcoming 2012 presidential election, especially due to the white vote, then the South’s electoral map will look exactly like the pro-slavery United States Confederacy during the Civil War.  

This observation came in response to host George Stephanopoulos noting that the latest polls show that six out of ten white Americans intend to vote for Romney.  

PBS reporter Gwen Ifill said that “we can’t ignore” the possible factor racial animus may play in deciding the election, noting that the poll indicates that, on some level, people are still willing to admit “racial bias.”  

Sullivan then added: “If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it’s the Confederacy. Entirely. You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War.”  

Conservative panelist George Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t know,” said a skeptical Ifill.

George Will is being too nice. Sullivan is, to put it charitably, full of shit. There's a nice map here, which may shock Sullivan, who seems to think that Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, and Kansas (all nearly certain to go to Romney) were part of the Confederacy (and that's before we get to areas that were not yet admitted as states). I'm also assuming Sully doesn't consider Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire or other swing states north of the Mason-Dixon Line to be part of the Confederacy if they vote for Romney, but maybe he lives in some alternate universe where the Civil War was very different (Lincoln was probably a Democrat in that telling).

I'm not even going to comment on the sad attempt to equate Southern disdain for big-government politics with racism. It's sad, but it's telling. Racism isn't the reason Barack Obama may lose, incompetence is. But crying racism will allow his supporters to ignore the truth.