I guess I just feel… ambivalent.
Obviously, I am excited about the newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, particularly the surprising victory of Claire McCaskill over Jim Talent in Missouri, which certainly no member of my Missouri-based family expected. While I am often disappointed in Democrats,* I rarely suspect that they would happily march me straight into the ocean if they got the chance. If they all actually represented these “San Francisco values” I keep hearing decried, I would be content.
I wasn’t surprised that Wisconsin retained its Democrats. I was surprised that Wisconsin voted to both ban gay marriage and recommend the reinstatement of the death penalty.
I’m not sure why. I was quite surprised that Arizona DIDN’T ban gay marriage, after all; “marriage” seems to be such a loaded term that people who might otherwise be reasonable go crazy and start acting like civil marriage is just EXACTLY LIKE a big church wedding with the POPE, and how dare we try to force people to act against their religious beliefs? As if a legal contract allowing you to inherit someone’s property, file taxes jointly with them, and visit them in the hospital when they’re dying had anything directly to do with God.
It’s Madison, I guess. It’s the only place I’ve lived in Wisconsin and even though I know that the rest of the state is just the same old insular (semi)rural Midwest, I imagine it as being so much better than Missouri, home state to Rush Limbaugh, that I am always surprised by things like this. Missouri, of course, has already passed a gay marriage ban, which was no surprise at all, but this time around they not only replaced the incumbent Republican senator with a female Democrat, they also raised the minimum wage and welcomed stem cell research to the state. I never thought I’d be happier with Missouri election results than Wisconsin ones.
The death penalty advisory referendum in Wisconsin, incidentally, was apparently so unimportant that CNN didn’t even include it on the list of issues that you could track on their election tracker. Wisconsin hasn’t had the notoriously unequally applied, totally ineffective as a deterrent death penalty for over 100 years. It was abolished in 1853, yet nobody thinks that trying to reinstate it is a big deal?
It looks like it passed by a similar margin to the marriage amendment–somewhere between 55-60% voting yes, from the preliminary results I was able to find. This isn’t as bad, as say, Tennessee’s gay marriage ban, which passed with over 80% of the votes. Clearly it is a more moderate climate. But the end result is the same: discrimination enshrined in the state constitution. It’s hard to get tremendously excited about the Democrats’ majority in Congress when faced with such immediate evidence of how mostly Democratic votes still /= MY values.
Of course, in two months I’ll be in Massachusetts.** I may be extraordinarily slow and scruffy by East Coast standards, but at least they have Kennedys.
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*In 2000, I voted for the socialist presidential candidate, and I am SORRY, okay? Given that I was still voting in Missouri at the time–via absentee ballot from Tokyo–my Gore vote might actually have made a difference.
**I learned to spell Mississippi; I can learn to spell this.
November 9th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Kennedys make any place better. ALso, our great hair
November 9th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Hey, Cabell.
The reason no one’s talked about the death penalty deal is that it doesn’t mean anything. The referendum was nonbinding, and was just a way to provide cover for state legislators’ pasty asses.
What it does is now give those douchebags the opportunity to crow about how “the public wants the death penalty,” even though the actual referendum gave pretty narrow circumstances.
Woo hoo. Go us.
November 9th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Jude: I know it was an advisory referendum; I’m just concerned about where it might lead. But you’re right that it does make the lack of coverage more understandable.
Channing: San Francisco had Kennedys, too. Dead ones. Oh, your amazing rock star name…
November 9th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I doubt this is any comfort at all, but I couldn’t spell Massachusetts until a few weeks after I’d already been living here.
November 9th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
When you move I am referring to your new place of residence as Mass.
Strangely there wasn’t as much coverage on the outcome of your elections here as I thought there would be, but recently I have noticed that the news reports here regarding our own politics have been subtly bias, which makes the part of my brain devoted to conspiracy over-react. Although the FBI is in the middle of establishing a field office out here, where before there were three FBI agents at the American embassy there will now be a whole office of them. They say it’s because of terrorists, but Australia has ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) so we really shouldn’t need an American intelligence office regardless of terrorists.
If things don’t go well when it’s time to replace your president and our Prime Minister America might be getting a new southern state.
November 10th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
As a resident of Missouri all my life, I must say the election results were shocking to say the least. Now as a liberal-as-they-come democrat, I am scared that these liberals that have been elected are just pretend republicans that just hate us a little less than the rest. The county you and I grew up in (Cape Girardeau, for those that do not know) made damn sure that that everyone knew how they felt. In Cape, Ms. McCaskill only received 9,000 votes as opposed to the 18,000 they gave to that rat-bastard Jim Talent.
And of course the two pack-a-day commie bastards, did not pass the cigarette tax. So really, I got everything I wanted from this election. Now we just have to see what happens….