While I admit to being disappointed in the election results, I'm not actually surprised. Despite all the pundits droning on about moral values, my take on things is far simpler. It is extremely rare for a sitting senator to be elected president. JFK was the last one. Going back before that, Eisenhower was a general who had never held elective office. Truman had been a senator, but that just got him to veep. FDR was governor of New York. Hoover was secretary of commerce. Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts. Ah, Harding was a senator. So maybe once every 10 elections a senator can make it. The point is that the United States Senate is not seen as fostering executive leadership and it's a rare person who can overcome that. In the absence of an incumbent president or the rare vice president who isn't a total nonentity, the best bet is a governor. Those Democrats talking about Hillary in 2008 are smoking something. Try for someone like Bill Richardson, though New Mexico might not be perceived as an important enough state. Is Mark Warner (my governor and, in my opinion, doing a reasonably good job of it) prominent enough? Incidentally, how many people caught the tidbit that Doug Wilder (a former Democratic governor of Virginia) got elected mayor of Richmond. That strikes me as an unusual and interesting career move.
I'll will note that the whole moral values thing probably did affect which voters turned out in some states, notably Ohio. Thinking about it, I'm not sure it's all that bad a basis for how one votes. One of the few things a president can actually do is appoint justices to the supreme court and given the nature of a lot of the court issues these days, I can see how that influences votes. In fact, the prospect of who Bush could appoint to the court is a lot of what influenced me to vote for Kerry. By the way, the pundits also got it wrong that the moral values vote was a sign that people don't think the courts should rule on gay marriage. The only state where the courts have endorsed gay marriage is Massachusetts and that wasn't one of the 11 states with a referendum on the subject. Oregon might be a battleground there, but I suspect that there's probably an urban/rural divide reflected in their vote. (And, I have to admit, I have no idea what the text of their referendum was, nor do I really know anything about Oregon politics.)
Regarding voter turnout, if my district is any indicator it was high. I got to the polling place at 6:20 a.m. (they open at 6 a.m. in Virginia) and had about a 45 minute wait. First there was the line to get into the building, then one of three alphabetized lines (naturally H-O was the longest, as I'm always in the slowest moving line anywhere), then another line to actually get to a machine, which split into three slow moving lines. I am disappointed that we have the touch screen machines without a paper trail here, as there is no way to be sure your vote actually has been recorded. I have no particular evidence of fraud, but I also worry about things that can happen by accident as well as by malice. For example, I read about places where the poll workers thought the cartridges could hold more data than they can, leading to thousands of votes not being recorded. Do you continue with using an ATM if you get the message that it's out of paper and won't be able to give you a record of your transaction? If not, why should you trust electronic voting without a paper record?
My final comment on the election can be put into one short word. Sixty. That's the number of senators you need on your side in order to get pretty much anything done in the senate. The Republicans now have 55 senators. There are actually fairly few things that all of them will be unanimous on. And it isn't enough to get them to change the senate rules. It's times like these that make me glad we have a system that fosters gridlock.
As for other things I did this week, we played Bohnanza at Murky Coffee Tuesday night. It was a fun game, in which you plant and harvest various types of beans. And what could be more suitable for election night than bean counting? I had brought Plague and Pestilence along, but Frederick (who likes that game a lot) didn't show. And I'll miss this week due to storytelling. One of my great theories in life is that everything happens at the same time. For example, if there are six events in any given year you really want to go to, five of them will be the same weekend.
Fortunately, this was not that same weekend, so I could be more leisurely. I drove to Culpepper and did the year round Volksmarch there yesterday. It was perfect autumn weather - cool and crisp - with a reasonable amount of fall foliage left along the way. The walk was a fairly ordinary one, or maybe all of these cute historic Virginia towns are just starting to blend together for me. If you don't live in the area, it's probably not worth a special trip, but it would be a good stopping point if you were driving from, say, D.C. to Charlottesville.
As for today, I remembered (barely) that this was a knitting group Sunday, so I've finally gotten a start on a sweater I bought the yarn for over 20 years ago. This is actually the first time I'm doing a pattern that requires following one of those graphs (this one is a picture of a polar bear) so it will be an interesting challenge.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel