4 November 1998: Election Afterglow

Wednesday, 4 November 1998:

Election Afterglow

Gee, that's one of the more provocative titles I've come up with.

I seem to be coming down with a cold. Ick. I'm really congested, and my throat feels kind of yucky. It's one of those colds that just came on pretty suddenly on Monday afternoon, and has gotten slowly worse since then.

Yesterday, of course, was election day. I did go to vote, I got to the polls around 6:30 pm, and found a line of about 150 people waiting to vote. Fortunately, I quickly clued into the fact that these were unregistered people (mostly students), and that already-registered people like myself could quickly go to the front of the line. (One good reason to vote in primaries: Shorter lines to register!) So I did that, and a good thing I did, because they ran out of ballots shortly after I voted. Apparently this was a problem in several places around the state, and some people had to wait until after the polls technically closed before they could vote.

Dane County - in which Madison resides - apparently had an all-time record turnout (as a percentage of eligible voters) for a mid-term election.

Last night I woke up around 2:30 am from a dream that Marc Neumann had beaten incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold in the US Senate race. I was so unnerved by this that it took me half an hour to get to sleep again; I had to force myself to think about something else. Ugh. I really like Feingold, I think he's a man of integrity and intelligence, one of our best politicians. On the other hand, the word I would use to describe Neumann is "evil", and I would have been truly depressed has Neumann won.

Well, Feingold did in fact win re-election, by a very narrow margin. In fact, Dane County more than accounted for the difference in the race - a fact which Neumann cattily brought up in his concession speech, claiming that "Dane County elected Feingold to represent Dane County in the US Senate". Feingold won elsewhere, of course (Milwaukee, for instance), but Neumann isn't one to let facts get in the way of a good rant. I heard one political pundit once exclaim that Neumann only had a chance to win as long as he didn't let Wisconsin voters see him for who he is.

So I was most happy about that.

Other things to be happy about: Democrat Tammy Baldwin beat Jo Musser to become Wisconsin's first female representative to Congress. She is also I believe the first openly gay woman in Congress. I am not a huge Baldwin supporter - mainly because I feel she talks a good fight, but her priorities could be better and I'm not sure how capable she is of fighting a good fight - but I think her heart's in the right place.

I was ecstatic that the Democrats managed to gain control of the State Senate, and especially that the nondescript Jon Erpenbach beat the finicky right-wing Nancy Mistele, whom I came to loathe when she was on the Madison School Board. (She spent a lot of time campaigning against the teacher's union, and I am a big teacher's union booster. These tax-cut nuts really can be out there on the fringe sometimes.)

And of course the Democrats captured the California governorship and gained some ground in the House of Representatives, and there's a chance that the Republicans may spend the next few months infighting due to their lack of success in this election. That would be pretty nice, especially if the Democrats can exploit it to good advantage in the year 2000.

Now, if we can just make the Democrats an actual liberal party again, we'll really be moving somewhere...

The only real negative on the day was the success of a few city and state referenda, such as funding for a connection between the city convention center (a huge boondoggle of a building taking up otherwise lovely lake shore property) and its hotel-to-be. Plus the passage of a referendum to enshrine the "right to keep and bear arms" into the state Constitution. (Sigh. Another victory for the pro-murder-and-mayhem movement.)

But all-in-all it was a good day.

What other news is there? I went to dinner with Karen last night, which was nice. We stopped in a used bookstore and I picked up a couple of things. We would have hung out longer but my cold was getting me down and I decided to go home and rest.

Tonight I went to the SF3 Wednesday social thing, which was also fun. One woman commented that she sort of avoided me at the Hallowe'en party because of the heavy make-up I was wearing, that she didn't feel comfortable talking to people whose faces she couldn't clearly see. I said I could understand that, since I always feel rather silly talking to anyone in a costume.

Oh, and the new Babylon 5 episode, "The Wheel of Fire", was on tonight. (Spoilers follow.)

It's pretty clear they're winding down the series, although Straczynski is also planting a lot of little elements which could be used in stories that take place after the series ends. But I don't think he's really planning to do so; he's just showing that just as the backstory from before the series affected the 5-year span of the show, so the events of the show will have effects after the series ends. I'm not sure what I think of that. I applaud the effort at verisimilitude, but it's dramatically rather frustrating.

I enjoyed the elements dealing with Garibaldi's alcoholism, but I rather wish that Lochley had come right out and told him that she was an alcoholic when they started their conversation. The "big dramatic buildup" didn't really work for me; it seemed forced and trite.

I keep getting these little flashes in my mind, though, that some of this stuff would have been even better if Jeffrey Sinclair were still here, rather than John Sheridan. Sinclair was Garibaldi's friend from some ways back, and the depths of his disappointment with Garibaldi would have been far more effective than Sheridan's, I think. Indeed, I still feel that Sinclair would have been an all-around more dramatically effective character in the series. But, oh well.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)