Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Mad Rush To The End Of A Mad Season 

...as the sun slips away behind the crest of the Oregon Cascade Range out the window to my right, the last day that mattered in what has been a truly wild and unprecedented primary campaign season is finally drawing to an end. All of the empty quiet that crept over Michigan and Florida, two states that usually do matter in the presidential candidate selection process, has been replaced in spades by a frenzy of Democratic campaigning in a state that hasn't mattered for 40 years. But the circus has packed up and left town, because ballots need to be in to the tiny little collection trailers that will be littering library parking lots all across the state by 8 p.m. tomorrow and - given another one of those quirky aspects of Orygun life - a large number of votes have already been cast...

It has been a crazy time and the supporters for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been treated to opportunities to turn out in support of their candidates in ways that this nondescript, usually overlooked state on the upper left-hand corner of the continental map may not see again for another couple of generations. Conventional wisdom would have normally dictated that Democratic candidates would confine themselves to Portland and the Willamette Valley, a region nestled between the Coast Range and the Cascades wherein reside the majority of reliable Democratic voters. That hasn't been the case this season. While all the recent buzz is about Obama's amazing Portland appearance this weekend at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on the west bank of the Willamette River on a spectacular Orygun day in front of 60 to 75 thousand people in what looked like a made-for-campaign-ad scene that probably made the Chamber of Commerce faint with delight but caused the rest of us to scream "Turn it Off!@!! Turn. It. Off!@!@!!" (just to protect our selfish way of life), the truly amazing aspect of this last few weeks has been what was going on over here on what is called the East Side....

The Eastern 2/3rd's of the Beaver State is reliably considered to be Red State territory. There have actually been gubernatorial campaigns where the eventual Democratic winner didn't even make campaign appearances east of the Cascade Crest and one would be hard-pressed to find an elected Democrat in any local, regional or state-level office in this place where I live. All of that has been turned on its head this year, though; candidates and surrogates have been popping up in all sorts of unlikely places mining for Democratic presidential primary votes and have turned out numbers that in all likelihood make various Republican party county officials sleep less comfortably at night. Obama came to Bend and filled a high school gym with over 2000 people - and it could have been twice that many if space had allowed, given the number of people who lined up for blocks trying to get free tickets to the event; Hillary and Bill have pulled that many and more in other Central Oregon locations; Barack brought 3000 to a venue in Pendleton in northeastern Orygun, which in itself is a truly astounding number, given that there are barely more people who even live within an hour's high speed drive of that community than showed up in Portland on Sunday...

It has truly been a crazy primary season in this forgotten little corner of the world that is better known for sports apparel and 'death with dignity' laws than it is for politics. The best part, for those of us who are iconoclastic Orygonians through and through (even if we aren't native-born to this state), is that tomorrow night - as far as the battalions of cable news talking heads assembled to "analyze" the results of this primary day are concerned - we are a black hole. Election coverage and "calling the winner" are usually based on exit polls in 'normal' states where people flock to churches, school gyms, libraries, and county court houses to cast their votes. We don't do that here; we quite literally mail it in or - in the case of lazy procrastinators like me - we drop our ballots off at collection points prior to the bewitching hour. There are no exiters to poll; the results are in the count of the ballots, not in the views of voters leaving the voting site. As far as the primary vote in Orygun is concerned for the phalanxes of chitterers on cable network news, there is nothing to do but drum impatient fingers on the desk and fill the air with a degree of inane banter heretofore unseen on America's TV screens while the vote count scrolls inexorably on...

"It's not a bug; it's a feature"...

Bill Clinton has been within 50 miles of the keyboard on which I am now typing more times than he was in the entire state during his presidency; Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been to places in this state that George W. Bush couldn't find on a map with help from a host of handlers; any one of them has set foot on the east side of the Orygun Cascades in the last month more times than John McCain has been in this entire State in his entire life. This madness is about to end, however; by tomorrow's sunset, Oregon will once again slip back into the shadows to become little more than another North Dakota except for the coastline and less extreme winter weather and more outdoor recreation and more famous recreational exercise and outdoor clothing manufacturers. But, with all due respect to the angry voters in Michigan and Florida, it was nice for us out here to matter for once...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:33 PM

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com