Blue states buzz over secession

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Originally published 12:27 a.m., November 9, 2004, updated 12:00 a.m., November 9, 2004

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Secession, which didn't work very well when it was tried once before, is suddenly red hot in the blue states. In certain precincts, anyway.

One popular map circulating on the Internet shows the 19 blue states won by Sen. John Kerry -- Washington, Oregon, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Maryland and the Northeastern states -- conjoined with Canada to form the "United States of Canada." The 31 red states carried by Mr. Bush are depicted as a separate nation dubbed "Jesusland."

The idea isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."

"Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California,'" said Lawrence O'Donnell, a veteran Democratic insider and now senior political analyst at MSNBC. "But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level of the red and blue states, the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'So what?'"

Mr. O'Donnell raised the subject of secession on "The McLaughlin Group" during the weekend. "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare-client states of the federal government," said Mr. O'Donnell, who was an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat.

In a telephone interview, Mr. O'Donnell said the red states that went to Mr. Bush "collect more from the federal government than they send in. New York and California, Connecticut -- the states that are blue are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does, from ... Social Security to everything else, and the people in those states don't like what this government is doing."

The Internet has exploded with talk of a blue-state confederacy, including one screed circulating by e-mail that features a map of a new country called "American Coastopia" and proposes lopping off the Northeast, the West Coast and the upper Midwest to form a new country, away from the "rednecks in Oklahoma" and the "homophobic knuckle-draggers in Wyoming."

"We were all going to move to various other countries, but then we thought -- why should WE move?" the anonymous message asks. "We hold our noses as we fly over you. We are sickened by the way you treat people that are different from you. The rest of the world despises America, and we don't want to be lumped in with you anymore."

The secession movement has already spawned commercial opportunism. One Web site is selling T-shirts that read "I seceded."

No one at the White House would comment on the calls for secession, but one top Republican official with ties to the Bush administration said the recent talk is not surprising, coming off an election in which the president received more than 59 million votes -- the most in history.

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