Last Night's Elections

Far be it for me to dispute the Conventional Wisdom that says last night's elections in Virginia and New Jersey "reveal[ed] cracks in [the] Obama coalition." Still, there are other possibilities based more on evidence than opinion.

Virginia governor - Virginia has a history of electing governors from the president's opposition party. Virginia was a stronghold for George W. Bush, yet elected two Democratic governors during his administration. No one thought either of those were a referendum on Bush.

New Jersey governor - New Jersey voters had a mad on for Jon Corzine well before Obama was elected. Corzine did little to curb their anger. This was more of a "and the horse you rode in on" election than a referendum on national politics.

One race that might be realistically viewed as showing a trend was the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. Three candidates ran: a Democrat, a Republican, and a Conservative. (There is an established Conservative Party in New York.) The Republican candidate was trashed for not being conservative enough; "opinion makers" such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann loudly endorsed the Conservative. The Republican candidate, turned on by her own party, dropped out and said the Democrat was a better choice than the Conservative. The Democrat won handily.

Conservatives went out of their way to make this a national election, and were trounced. The Republican party finds itself in a similar position to Muslims. They either need to speak out against their extreme branches, or risk becoming condemned with them.

Maturity Watch

I thought the voting age was eighteen.

Allegedly thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters are still threatening to cut off their noses to spite their faces and not vote for Barack Obama in November’s election. Women who six months ago described themselves as part of Hillary’s cadre of political realists, dismissing Obama’s candidacy as pie in the sky, are now whining about party favoritism (though Clinton supporters played a large role in originally denying representation to the Florida and Michigan delegations), sexism (though Hillary herself was happy to play the victim for much of the campaign, and Geraldine Ferraro et al didn’t mind dropping a racial reminder or three), or whatever else they can think of to “prove” their candidate got jobbed.

As a free service, The Home Office is happy to say what Hillary Clinton would probably like to say and Barack Obama can’t say:

Grow the fuck up. If you’d shown ten percent of the passion for caucuses you’ve shown for whining, Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. You want to point fingers, look in a mirror.

Bitter?

I am a native of Western Pennsylvania, grew up in what used to be a small steel town. My father, grandfather, and uncle worked for Alcoa. I left the Pittsburgh area when I joined the army in 1980; the only relatively local teaching job I could find paid $8500.

I still visit my parents in the house where I grew up. My roots to Pittsburgh are deep and solid; the Post-Gazette's web site is regular reading for me. I've lived from Atlanta to Boston to Chicago to Washington DC, but I still consider myself a Pennsylvanian.

That's why the furor over Obama's "bitter" comments offends me. Over the past forty years, the people he's talking about—people I grew up with—have seen their jobs, their medical insurance, and their pensions disappear. Their children—such as me—have moved away to find jobs with futures. Every "improvement" in the American economy has passed them by. Damn right they're bitter. If they seem insular and untrusting, that's because they're down to a few things they can depend on, and they're holding onto them for dear life. If they think every advance made by another group comes at their expense, they have forty years of experience of watching it. The anger is misdirected—more of what they lost has gone to wealthy whites than poor blacks—in large part because Republicans have based their success over the past three decades on portraying the races as natural foes, when the real issue has been class.

Obama’s comments will not play as much of a role as the media predicts for one reason: little offense will be taken. These people know they're bitter. They're used to it, and they might even like Obama a little more for recognizing it in them.

My life and family are established here now; I'm not likely to move back to Pittsburgh. It still makes me feel good to see Pennsylvania play an important role in this pivotal election, as the parts of it I know so well have been taken for granted for so long.