Get Out And Vote

So this is the last note before Election Day, and I have very little to add than what I said below. But I will say it again, anyway:

US Senator: Maria Cantwell
US Rep, 8th District: Darcy Burner
State Senator, 47th District: Claudia Kauffman
State Rep, 47th District, Pos 1: Geoff Simpson
State Rep, 47th District, Pos 2: Pat Sullivan
State Supreme Court Judge: Susan Owens
NO on I-920
NO on I-933
YES on I-937

Cantwell's opponent, Mike McGavick, has pretty much imploded, and has concentrated his final week on a hail-mary attack on John Kerry. He chose to attack Kerry because he was afraid Michael J. Fox would kick him to the curb.

Burner's opposition, Dave Reichert, keeps throwing off signals that he'd like to self-destruct, but his political masters won't let him. He's been making a lot of noise of his 35 years of public service, though only two of those years have been in the position he is now defending. And you get the feeling that he would be much happier fighting criminals on the streets than voting alongside them in Congress (Heck. Ney of Ohio was convicted for god's sake, and kept drawing a paycheck).

Reichert put himself into a tempest in a teapot as well, with the whole question of the President getting flipped off a while back. Here's the story - Bush is in town campaigning for Reichert (who wants to make clear that he's not a sockpuppet for the administration). They're tooling along in the motorcade, not owing each other anything at all, and this school bus driver flips off the president. Now, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the driver in this case. You don't do things like that. It doesn't matter that we have video of the president doing the same damned thing - its not like the President is a role model anymore (nor is the Veep for the moment - I can see teenagers trying to get away with profane language and lax gun safety by saying "The Vice President did it!").

Anyway, the school bus driver gets canned, and Reichert claims his office had nothing to do with it. OK, but then it cpmes out that his office DID complain, but only after a week, and the school district had already taken action (someone in the Bush camp complained). OK, not the earlier story, but close. THEN it turns out that Reichert was telling a completely different story at campaign stops, about how he personally called the next day and got the driver fired.

So Reichert suddenly has a truthiness problem, one that gets up to the USA Today level of coverage. Its cool if he went after the offending driver - it makes him look like the badass sherrif he wants to be. And its cool if he chilled his jets and checked into it after some reflection - nice measured response. And its cool if he let it slide - turning the other cheek. But he claimed to do all three, depending on who he was talking to. So he's thinking that at least one of his audiences is made up of idiots.

So pile this on top of the other missteps of this campaign - surly interviews, not knowing anything about media consolodation in a debate, blowing off the League of Women's Voters and the AARP, trying to simultaneously hang with the president and get offended when others talk about him hanging with the president. Meanwhile, his opponent has run a school on how to go from grassroots campaign to serious challenge and national appearance.

Yeah, so based upon what they've DONE, I strongly recommend that the natives of the 8th go out in the rain and vote for Darcy Burner. It is time for a change, and she has demonstrated that she organizational skills to make the big time.

Oh, and the school bus driver? Has a new job, driving a bus in Renton. So I'm going to be very careful on my morning commute from here on out.(sigh)

More later,