Reflections after Elections

I had resigned myself to having little effect on the elections. Dane County is pretty solidly leftist, so Tammy’s seat was secure: she’s pretty far left wing. The Senate race was also pretty lopsided. I’m not a big fan of calling folks in other states to tell them how to vote—we designed the country as a federal system for good reasons. So, I did my duty but without any grand sense of expectation or of worry. I sleep soundly on election nights.

Of course now we’re a-swamp in postmortems, most of them rattling the same themes: corruption and the war. I didn’t pay much mind to the corruption scandals: it seemed very much business as usual on the Hill; and I still fail to see what bearing the illicit doings of a clergyman I never heard of should have on whether or not I and my friends go to vote.

The war I do care about, and I fault the Republicans for not taking it seriously enough. (Institute tax cuts during war time? What???) I hope the rhetoric from prominent Democrats was just campaign nonsense, but I’m not sanguine about the chances of that. I suspect Bin Laden was right about American staying power.

Madison is still littered with graffiti and signs and bumper stickers asserting that “A Fair Wisconsin Votes NO.” Dane County certainly did, by over 2 to 1. Wisconsin, on the other hand, had fairly different ideas. The local paper dug up some resulting shock and horror. The Wisconsin amendment has an additional clause that could, if lawyers stretched it enough, also ban “civil unions” that resembled marriages. I’d call that a feature, not a bug. Why multiply institutions?