Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Still in Arizona.  Went to a dinner hosted by one of my clients at his condo.  Upon arriving, I felt a little sheepish when I audibly locked my car (it honked when I used the key remote), since it was a posh and aggressively gated community.  But, hey, ANYONE might be delighted with my 3-year-old laptop and growing bag of dirty clothes.  Why make it easy?

It was kind of interesting seeing people sort themselves out.  I’m here because two firms are being acquired and merged, and there are some cultural differences.  On the patio where the hors d’oeuvres were served, it was all-LDS, and the beverages were Martinelli’s and iced tea.  After a while, I noticed the absence of certain of the guests, and ultimately discovered a group in a corner of the kitchen gathered around a couple bottles of expensive Cabernet.

The dinner was in Phoenix, and I needed to work in Phoenix the next day, but my hotel is in Tucson, prepaid for several nights through Expedia.  Still, I didn’t want to drive the 100 miles to Tucson, sleep, then drive back, so I decided to take a room in Phoenix.  I didn’t want to just walk up to the desk at a hotel and pay their highest off-the-street-at-10pm sucker rate, so I hatched the brilliant idea of pulling into the parking lot of a hotel I was passing that advertised free wireless internet.  Sitting in the car, I opened my laptop, connected to their signal and perused the deals at Cheaprooms.com.  Finding one to my liking, I purchased a reservation, closed up my laptop and drove out of the parking lot, feeling pretty smug and techno-hip.

When I got to the hotel, however, they acknowledged the reservation but said they were full, and that Cheaprooms shouldn’t have shown any availability.  By now it was nearly 11, and I was feeling a little deflated and, well, silly.  I finally drove up to an old Ramada whose price was not that much more for the night, and contented myself with dialup access to finish the evening.

After slogging through the drenching Seattle rain yesterday morning to vote, I caught a flight to Tucson and an engagement with a new client.  Today, instead of the pity-parties I’m reading about that others are deriving comfort from, I had to endure the smugness of the “it’s a great day in America” crowd.  The weather’s nice, though.

I haven’t really had time to settle my own thoughts, other than to delve a bit into the sort of despair that Christopher Key is imbibing.  I considered, on a long drive from Tucson to Phoenix, whether I could continue to live in and be a part of the America that I postulated would exist in 2 years.

I really feel that we’ve been disserved by the Democratic party in its current form.  I mean, Kerry was sort of a Frankenstein of a candidate, but it could easily have been Gephardt or Daschle, guys who have fumbled the legislative leadership of party for 8 or more years.  On our local front, we have a guy, Jim McDermott, who, as I’ve said before, is a virtual voting machine for me, but, given his “representative for life” status in our district, has not developed into a leader with any stature.  Instead, he buffoonishly stumbles from stupid stunt to stupid stunt.  Recently, a judge ordered him to pay  Ohio Republican John Bohner something like $600,000 in damages and legal fees over his bungled handling of a taped cell phone conversation.  The Party leaders in Washington want donors to step up and bail him out, but I say let him hang.  If we can raise that kind of money, we can buy a legislative race in some Republican district.  The Party needs to jettison the scions of its failed leadership and, in safe districts such as ours, start running folks with some giddy-up and fire in their eyes.

If we all decide to stay here instead of colonizing Canada, I think we need to start with a serious makeover of the Democratic party, or by fashioning a new party to our liking.  I’m thinking the Dems will take a serious look at veering right, reacting to exit polls of yahoos braying about “values”.  Which part of the red-state electorate do you want to bed down with?  We need to pay attention to what tectonic shifts begin to occur in the Party, and not wait 2 years for it to be set in stone.