My Own Election Analysis

So much for the anti-incumbent mood which has been so hyped by the press. It was hilarious to watch the national punditry backtracking from their earlier gravedigging for Blanche Lincoln. In California at least, to my knowledge, not one single incumbent in either party lost to a challenger.

So much, in fact, for MSNBC’s poll which showed i.i.r.c. that only 29% of voters “favored retaining my congressperson.”

Whitman and Fiorina, both of whom I voted against, won but I’m not sure that really matters. I doubt either can win in November, although it can certainly get ugly. Each spent more money in her primary campaign than has ever been spent in the respective general election for the office, Whitman exponentially more, so pretty soon we will be spending more on elections in this country than we do on wars.

The race for California Secretary of State features, unbelievably, Orly Taitz. She is still claiming that Obama was born in Kenya, but I’m unsure how she thinks that winning this office is going to further that claim for her. Lawrence O’Donnell, who lives in California, was on Countdown last night to analyze this race, and the segment was well worth watching. Hilarious.

All of these idiotic media and pundits will be supremely unembarrassed by having 100% blown the predictions for election outcomes in yesterday’s primary. They will, in fact, pretend that they did not blow those predictions, offering reasons for victory and defeat, pretending that they knew those reasons prior to yesterday, and blissfully citing results as if they had predicted them all along.

“Of course Blanche Lincoln won yesterday because she was anti-union in a right-to-work state, where unions are not popular.”

The day before, of course, her anti-union stance was not in her favor, because the very powerful unions were backing Halter and vastly enriching his campaign. Between the money he had amassed and the power of the voting union membership, she was toast.

Back to California, the “Election Reform” proposition passed, and the “Taxpayer’s Right To Vote Act” is too close to call, which proves that Californians base their proposition votes on the title of it and never bother to read the damned things. The former one means that in some districts there will be two Republicans on the general election ballot and in others there will be two Democrats, which hardly serves the purported purpose of reducing the impact of partisan politics. Passage of the latter means that PG&E has a permanent monopoly on utility delivery in the state. Sheesh.

In San Diego the “Strong Mayor” form of city government was approved, proving once more that titles of bills matter more than content, and that emotion triumphs over common sense every time. The change means adding another district at an additional administrative cost of more than
$1 million per year, and it puts the checkbook in the hands of an elected politician rather than a person who actually has an education in the management of cities.

"We want a strong city, so we need strong mayor government."  Gack.

An anti-union measure passed in Chula Vista, suggesting that the ongoing decline of labor unions is not entirely due to government policies, but is partly due to declining popular appeal. I blame the abuses committed by public unions for much of that, with their inability to recognize the effect that their greed has on their fellow citizens. Public unions doom the overall labor movement by failing to acknowledge that their excesses takes money from the men and women who create public policy in voting booths.

A lot of noise, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Update: Orly Taitz was crushed, losing 77%-23% to Damon Dunn, former Jacksonville Jaguars football player, who didn't even actually campaign. Californians, it turns out, do retain some small shred of sanity.