The election wasn’t too bad for me.

Corzine lost in New Jersey, but he was the incumbent and had also been elected to the US Senate. Besides, he was a banker by profession, the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs. He’s clearly in the game for power so it doesn’t surprise me that he is also one of a growing group of public officials caught in a sex scandal. A lawyer who was previously a federal prosecutor beat him. It’s quite possible that he hasn’t been corrupted by the process of being elected … so maybe he’ll be OK. The fact that Corzine was the Democrat cuts no ice with me.

Virginia wasn’t quite as good. Another prosecutor, Bob McDonnell, won. But he had also been elected to the Virginia House of Delegates seven times. You don’t have to sell your soul to Satan to be elected to a state assembly, but you at least have to bargain with his minions. McDonnell must have been on a first name basis at the reception room in Hell. Sure enough, in his most recent run for State Attorney General, he spent almost twice as much as the other guy to buy the election. (It cost him over six million dollars and then he jumped ship to run for this job.  The antedeluvian in New York’s 23rd only spent three million on a national contest with lots of outside money.) I don’t think the good folks in Virginia have elected someone who cares about them. He seems to care about himself a lot more.

And in New York’s “interesting” 23rd Congressional District, a true right-wing knuckle dragger seems to have gone down in a close contest. I score this one as a triple loss for the dark side. Not only did their man lose, but they pulled out all the stops in a district they should have been able to take easily. It was a dirty, dirty campaign. Right wingers again showed that they believe that their end justifies any means and only winning matters, not what you have to do to win. In spite of the fact that out-of-state wing-nuts made this an “Alamo” election, the really big loser was the local Republican machine that had become totally corrupt after 150 years of continuous power. They lost twice in one election and that’s hard to do.

New York’s 23rd made up for all the others!

The most disappointing loss was the rejection of the right of gays to get married in Maine. But it seems to me that the struggle of gays to get equal rights will win over the long run no matter what the right wing believes God says about it. Why? Because gays have stopped apologizing and instead are walking up to their neighbors and introducing themselves. By and large, they’re nice people. I remember the first gays I actually knew was a nice lesbian couple who used to go on canoe trips with my wife and I. It’s really hard to believe that they’re accursed of God when you know a few on a first name basis. (I have no idea how Cheney wraps his mind around that since he has an out-of-the-closet lesbian daughter … but there are a lot of things I don’t understand about him.) The right wing only wins these contests by demonizing gays, and that will become harder and harder to do over time.

Oh … And here are the unaudited election results from Springdale here in Color Country. The Town Manager let me keep the official card as a souvenier of our election party last night.

Our mayor Pat Cluff won, of course, since she was running unopposed. At last night’s party, I congratulated her on a brilliant and successful campaign. She said it was cheap, too!

For Town Council, the only actual race, the result was (in alphabetical order):

John Callahan 129
Colin Dockstader 160
Jonathan Zambella 104
Write-Ins 9

Congratuations to new Council members John and Colin! (Well … Partial congratulations to Colin since this means I have no hope of escaping from being the Planning Commission chairman now.)

The other interesting statistic was that Town Clerk Fay Cope’s magnificent campaign to bring out the vote resulted in a 64.7% turnout. That’s amazing! But since the results also include the datum that this amounted to 217 votes, simple math tells us that Springdale only has 335 voters.

Ya gotta love a small town! Especially this one.