Election Day
By Kent Manthie
Last Tuesday there was a big change in America. It was called an election and even though only 40% of eligible, registered voters made it to the polls, it was a big enough surge – 40% is a big turnout for a mid-term congressional election, when no president is being elected – to bring change to the political landscape, however fleeting it may be.
It turns out that since the Nov. 7 election, at least one county, in Florida, is ditching those new electronic voting machines after experiencing major problems with them in this just passed election. That doesn’t bode well for the EVMs does it? I hope that more and more counties around the US do likewise in time for the next election, in 2008. When I got to my local polling place last week and saw, with revulsion, that they finally started using electronic machines there too I asked for a paper ballot to fill out instead of using the machines. Luckily the same paper ballots that I’ve always completed at this polling station were available. I didn’t want to have my vote switched by remote control hacking. I would urge everyone to do likewise in the future until the secretaries of state in all the states get the message and ditch them altogether.
All night on Tuesday, I had it on C-SPAN, who had the best coverage, with no commercials, no obnoxious people, although they do have their own hosts, but they are very intelligent and no matter what anyone says, one cannot detect any sort of biases or political slants in any of them. They all have stone faces in that respect.
In fact, in the months leading up to the election, they had coverage, live in some cases, of many congressional and gubernatorial debates from around the country, mostly with the cooperation of local television stations, who were the hosts of the debate in many cases.
This year, 2006, has seen one of the most exciting, issue-driven mid-term elections that I can recall in some time. I think 1994 was the last time a mid-term election was this captivating- literally, like when the GOP ‘captured’ the House for the first time in 42 years. It’s only been 12 years now for the Democrats but after these stifling last few years this breakthrough is a real breath of fresh air for the country.
I can’t think of another time when an election has had such an effect on one’s mood. I doubt if it’s only me; I’m sure there are others who woke up on Wednesday and had a brighter outlook on the future for the first time in a while; hope instead of a gnawing sense of dread which threatened to turn into apathy but instead was channeled into a better outcome.
The excitement and even the results weren’t finished on Wednesday morning. Just a few days ago as of this writing (Nov. 16, ’06) Joe Courtney was declared the winner after a delay due to uncertainty and a recount in which Courtney, the Democratic candidate for US Congress from Connecticut was the eventual winner. That result was just icing on the cake. There is still at least one race still not called yet and that is another US House race, this one from Florida. At the Capitol the other day they took a photo of the incoming freshmen to the 110th US Congress and both candidates from this Florida race were allowed to pose in the picture since they hadn’t picked a winner there yet; they were: Vern Buchanan-R and Christine Jennings-D, Fla.
One non-Republican who made me cringe was Joe Lieberman (D-CT), who ended up running as an independent when his state’s voters picked someone else in the Democratic primary race back in August. Back then it seemed that Ned Lamont would ride that big wave of momentum on which he surfed into a primary victory. But after Lieberman started running for the general election as an independent Lamont never regained the lead and in fact trailed Joe in polling by at least 3 points – and more – all the way to Nov 7.
Lieberman should be gone since he lost the primary back in August and Ned Lamont was picked as the CT Democratic choice for US Senate. The thing of it is, Joe Lieberman is so damn selfish, so venal, so vain that he doesn’t care about anything but Joe, Joe, Joe; and boy, is he annoying! Hearing him talk – that whiny nasal voice of his – it makes me cringe; he just grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. Now, since dirty, ol’ Joe won re-election as an independent, he’s now making threats to switch to the GOP, says he hasn’t “…ruled it out.” Of course, the only reason he’s doing this is to extort the Democrats to give him what he wants or he’ll bolt and if he did join the Republicans they’d be right back in the majority, since that would make it 50-50 and with Dick “please-die-of-a-heart-attack” Cheney, an evil man with no conscience whatsoever, being the President of the Senate and a Republican, it would break any tie; ergo, a de facto majority.
But, take heart, Democrat fans: in just two more years, when Bush’s term is up, the Republicans, in that election, have 21 senators up for re-election and I think the Dems only have 12 or something like that, so it will just take a few more Republican defeats in ’08 to extend the Democrats’ majority to where it’s comfortable. That’s the name of the game in that election (extension of the majority that is).
With the Democrats’ majority in congress now, what will become of the White House in 2008? One of myriad reasons for their win last week was that Republicans have a stranglehold over all three branches of government. They controlled all three branches, basically, if you count being able to nominate multiple people to fill Supreme Court vacancies as controlling the High Court. Now, if the Democrats hang onto the Senate, they’ll be in control of congress and America has a history of having divided government, in some fashion, be it Democratic congress and Republican president or vice versa, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Democrats can turn things around 180 degrees to their favor in 2008 and increase their lead comfortably in the senate and House or if the public opts for divided government. But after this disastrous presidency, 8 years of incompetence in the White House, incompetence that has GOP written all over it, they will be hard-pressed to escape that tainted legacy in ’08. Their only hope is John McCain.
One senator whom I was glad to see get thrown out was Rick Santorum (R-PA); so long, asshole! Only problem is, the guy who beat him, Bob Casey, Jr., PA State Auditor and now US Senator-elect, is not much better, he is only a good replacement for Santorum in the fact that he is a Democrat and helped to give them a majority, but as an individual he is nothing to be excited nor proud about: he’s pro-life, for one thing. There is not much that I hate more than some self-righteous jerk who thinks he can shove his anachronistic and really stupid beliefs down people’s throats. He has a right to be as dumb as he wants but he has no right to try to spread that stupidity around. Americans need to be enlightened, minds opened. We don’t need to be slid down a path toward a new dark age, toward which most of America is already heading. It’s time to try and reverse it as much as possible, at least for the younger generations, before their minds get turned to jelly.
So, as it lies now, there are many miles yet to go. Although a new majority for the congress is nice, in terms of fresh air and a slight leftward shift, many of the Democrats who won were moderate, relatively conservative Democrats, in many cases, who defeated all the moderate Republicans. The few new Republicans who won, along with the ones who held onto office are all further to the right with the result that although the Dems have the majority don’t expect any radical things to happen – like impeachment or a swift pullout from Iraq, even though it was stuff like that which elected the Democrats in the first place, especially a repudiation of Bush on Iraq, among other things.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel: in just two years there is a chance to extend that majority. With 21 GOP Senators up for re-election in ‘08 the Dems have a good chance of extending their majority to a comfortable lead; then they can tell Lieberman to go to hell!