The reality is that few states are really red or blue. Most are some shade of purple, so you can't say that the reds are here and blue states are there. Furthermore, the blue states are in much better shape financially than the red states.
Republicans talk about being in favour of small government and balanced budgets, but the reality is that the Democrats are much better with the budgets, and reducing the size of government. The size of government went down under Carter, Clinton and Obama, and up under Reagan and W increased dramatically. W presided over the largest increase in the size of government since Roosevelt in the Great Depression.
As a fiscal conservative, I believe in balanced budgets and decreasing the size of government, but you don't do it by over regulating abortion, or who goes into and out of the women's washroom.
In terms of balancing the budget, Republicans are good at spending money, but they put it all on the credit card. Democrats at least fund their programs with taxes. Conservatives call the Democrats the party of "tax and spend". At least they tax BEFORE they spend and don't depend on magical thinking that the deficit will disappear if they cut taxes.
No, I don't think you can break the country apart and separate the disparate groups. But I seriously believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and the US is very divided. Not all ideas that the other party has are bad. That goes both ways. If you can't learn to compromise and get along, things will get worse.
Things don't get much worse than they are now. Democrats are for evil and Republicans are for good. So where is the middle ground between evil and good?
There is none, and that's why I would support a total separation of the country by political affiliation.
You talk about the presidency as if the president were the king. But we have a multi-layer of government that guides us. Congress makes the laws in our country along with taxation. Reagan was a President during a Democrat Congress. Clinton was President with a Republican Congress. Most of DumBama's term, you got it, under a Republican led Congress. Bush, also under a Republican Congress which got voted out because those Republicans started to act like Democrats.
We would have a balanced budget today if not for DumBama, however, the Republicans in Congress have limited our spending bringing us closer to that point. The only problem with the Republicans is their fear of a government shutdown which DumBama would be more than happy to provide because the MSM would promote it's all the Republicans fault and not DumBama or the Senate Democrats.
No you wouldn't have. Bush crashed the economy with his tax cuts and his wars, and the housing bubble. In order to balance the budget, you would have had to pull out of both wars, fully, stop spending on the military, and bring the troops home, and to what? An economy shedding 500,000 jobs a month?
In order to balance the budget, you would have to increase revenues, and/or cut spending. You spend during a recession, and cut during periods of growth. To increase taxes is unwise, as it tends to deepen a recession, as does cutting spending.
As an example, in the run up to the Canadian election last year, the Conservative government wanted to run on a balanced budget. Spending cuts would have balanced the budget by 2017, but the Conservative government was desperate to tell Canadians they had balanced the budget, so they made some very deep cuts to spending to achieve that goal. It put the country into a mild recession, and still failed to balance the budget because of reduced revenues caused by falling oil prices.
One has to wonder if Obama has been allowed to spend more to stimulate the economy, whether the recovery would have been quicker.