Election Angst
… still hangs on. In Washington, it’s prolonged by the governor’s race that has yet to be decided. I’ve made some fun of Georgia’s having a governor named “Sonny” (I’m in Atlanta for the week). Now there’s good chance we’ll have one named “Dino”. Christine Gregoire, the Democratic Attorney General, is in a virtual dead heat with a small-time realtor and state senator named Dino Rossi. Gregoire started out the campaign way ahead, but played “prevent” defense throughout the campaign while Rossi, an anti-choice Catholic with a very conservative voting record, took a lot of Republican money and painted himself as a moderate. No way it should have been that close - it’s another example of Democratic campaign strategies that can’t find the end zone.
As a partial cure for election angst, you might be intrigued by The Seattle Stranger’s proposition that Democrats and progressives, as a way to gain the cohesion of message and self-image that the Solid Right seems to have right now, target its politics towards an Urban Archipelago:
Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion–New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on.
The article goes over the top quite often, in typical Stranger fashion, but the focus it provides is intriguing. It also allows us to quit blaming everyone in “red” states (fuckthesouth/) and reach out to like-minded folks stranded on progressive islands there. I think this article, plus other reading in this issue, might raise your spirits some.
