A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America

Sadly, from my beloved Lincoln Center/Upper West Side hood, here's a great example of how we screwed up this election. If I didn't have friends who say similar things, I'd think this Dr. Joseph quoted in the New York Times was working for Karl Rove:

"City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with characteristic New York bluntness. Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center.... 'I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland,' Dr. Joseph said. 'This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland.' 'New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us,' he said."

His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say." "They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."

Yup. that's the way to win friends and influence people. Perhaps we Dems could begin to regroup by not contemptuously disparaging our fellow Americans no matter how justified one feels.