Vote early, vote often

Election Day! Woot!

We here in 5L are hoping for a good solid Democratic victory (at least the royal We is, but I think I speak for Kolz as well). We here also need to pony up and get cable. News coverage on WNYC and public radio is very good, but there's just something about the flashy red & blue hyper-animated national political map and Chris Matthews flipping out that just makes Election Night Election Night.* I'll be heading over to one of the student common rooms to catch coverage once more polls close at 10 or so.

It's interesting to live in the liberal bastion of Gotham and be more interested in races at home - or at least, close to home, like Missouri - than here. I blame it on a relatively late awareness of how to be politically active, since being young my first big election was 2000. But Spitzer was in, Clinton was in, we're blue, blue, blue. Connecticut is interesting, as is Virginia. And Missouri, Tennessee. I hope the Democratic Party can just get its shit together - Papa Bear was well and truly unhappy with both major parties when I spoke with him this afternoon, and Brother B gets like that, too.

I'm not pissed enough to go Green or Libertarian, but the sense that our party system is bent way out of whack is so prevailing, I just don't know. I always think back to the 19th century, and how the party system shifted then, and it's usually a big, cataclysmic thing -- and in the final analysis (historically), it's the long sweep that matters. A turnaround election seems to only have 12 or so years of traction -- so it was with Jackson and Lincoln. I guess I think on those times, and how the nation was in tumult, and I wonder if that's what we require for a political shift? We clearly aren't on the brink of civil war or dealing with a massive democratization and/or expansion of the franchise, and thank God for that. But I try to imagine what it would be like if our current party system somehow broke - what would we have? How would it work? Could the apparatuses and committees, which seem so irrelevant to me in terms of policy-making (great for fundraising, natch), change? And what would historians a hundred years down the road say caused it?

Pardon the geek-out - I can laugh at myself and the earnestness of saying I always think back to the 19th c. It's the company I keep. But oooh, returns: Santorum is out! Since we are a family website, we won't go where Dan Savage went, but ha. Ha, ha.

There is a great Lyle Lovett song on "My Baby Don't Tolerate" called "Election Day" -- Marketplace (on NPR) used it a while back as a music bit between segments, and it's been in my head for the last week. Auf Deutsch this is an "Ohrwurm" = ear worm, eww. And now, I give it to you. Or at least to my 3 Lyle Lovett-loving friends.

* We got our fill of it in 2004. I remember: zonked after doing GOTV stuff in Allentown, and flipping from channel to channel on exit figures, finally giving up at 1 am. Half-asleep and hearing a muffled "Son of a...!" from the living room when the networks called Ohio, and then calling Raquel in Cali to commisserate, only to find out that she wasn't watching the same news I was, and didn't know yet. Peter Jennings and Dan Rather were still doing the news then. The mournful phone calls that followed (though as for Kerry, eh, my favorite candidate will always be Bill Bradley). Such drama!