The man who voted an hour after the victor was declared. It's not a joke:
After waiting nearly five and a half hours to vote, John Hailey cast his ballot the day after Election Day — at 12:25 a.m.
Hailey was the last person to vote at Madison Public Library and one of the last to vote in all of Nashville. He attributed the wait to long lines, too few voting machines and time-consuming paperwork that needed to be filled out by people who had moved recently.
The Bloggers Man Wins.
A lot of Lib Dems will have followed the Senate race in Tennessee, where the Republican Bob Corker beat the Democrat Harold Ford. What's intriguing is that Harold Ford previously had a seat in the House of Representatives. And the new Democrat candidate for that seat - who emerged through the primary process - was a guy called Steve Cohen . Cohen is definitely on the left of the Democratic Party and, incidentally, a white man standing in a black majority district. Did this upset certain people? Because Harold Ford's brother Jake stood as an independent....
Time Magazine reported it as follows:
Rhetoric has been heated. Thaddeus Matthews, a politically independent African American whose widely read local blog is part scandal sheet, part political tip-sheet, early in the campaign dismissed "Joke Ford" as an un-credentialed political novice and high-school dropout who lacked his congressman brother's finesse and did odd jobs for his father. That has also been the perspective of an influential corps of liberal white bloggers who pooled their efforts on Cohen's behalf during the primary.
The bloggers see themselves as representatives of Democratic Party progressives who long ago soured on Harold Ford Jr.'s ever-more-conservative rhetoric and voting record.
Cohen won easily on Thursday, with Ford second and the Republican third.
The Third Man. Meanwhile, in that Tennessee senate contest, it wasn't just Corker v Ford, there were 5 independent candidates as well. The third placed candidate, a chap called Ed Choate, got 10000 votes.
His website is interesting - not everybody becomes a Christian after being in a juvenile detention hall in Brazil- and he seems to be a biblical literalist ( I believe that that the world was created in six literal days, no more than Ten thousand years ago, and that we all came from Adam and Eve.) He has an wide-ranging set of policies, from supporting "good and comprehensive Health Insurance" to giving "our National guards and border patrol, permission to shot anyone trying to enter our country illegally without them being afraid of being prosecuted for human rights violation."
The Fourth Man
The guy who came 4th in the Senate contest, with about 3000 votes, was David Gatchell, who stood as a "None of the Above" candidate.
"Ever had the feeling you'd just rather skip an election than have to pick the least unqualified of the candidates? That none of them are worth taking off work and going to the poll to vote for? Yeah? Me too."
The Republicans Have Become Too Left-Wing
Finally, one lady blogger in Tennessee quotes an email she received today which puts , ahem, an interesting spin on things:
The single, most important lesson here: Democrats didn’t win; Republicans lost. And they didn’t just lose; they were routed. Voters didn’t reward Democrats, they punished Republicans. Badly. This wasn’t the country saying it wanted to go further Left; it was the country saying Republicans had already taken the country too far Left.
Hat Tips: Tennessee Politic Blog
2 comments:
I had heard - it included one Republican State Congressman as well, I believe.... so no credit to either party here....
Dean's 50-state strategy, which I had my doubts about, worked in the mountain states, which the Dems, even two years ago, might have written off, like they had the South. Maybe Harold Ford needed more money, or maybe TN isn't ready for a black US Senator. I was trying to find a specific smear ad on YouTube, but was unable to do so.
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