Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The political rainbow

One of my 'Stralian cousins emailed me wondering why in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, the main conservative party is blue(ish in the case of the UK Conservatives) and that the centre lefties are red. But that in the USA the reverse is true.

Anyone have any idea?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We could Google it, or just make up stuff ...

Back in 1776 the Republicans picked red is because they knew it would be the Redneck states that would vote for them. That left the Dems with the other two colours of the flag. They rejected in white in case they ever decided to have a black leader ("yeah, as if" said George Washington) so that left then with blue.

As you can tell, I Googled it, instead of making up stuff.

laughykate said...

Great search engine, that Google.

Anonymous said...

It seems like CNN switched them in '96.
More here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005156.php

laughykate said...

That's crazy stuff. Woulda thought they'd want to pick a colour and then stick to it, (but then maybe red wasn't someone's colour one year).

Anonymous said...

the red/blue labels were courtesy of the MSM.

one can only speculate on why the commies were NOT assigned the traditional 'red' color.

~ShyAsrai~