It wasn’t a disaster everywhere, and out of such crumbs must we nourish our hopes till we get our whup-ass mojo going again (Monday, dudes…we’ve got work coming).
So, with that, smile on the results from my home state:
Governor — check (Go Deval!)
All 10 House seats — check (yay Barney!)
All statewide races — check (err, two cheers for Martha Coakley?) (No, I guess I haven’t forgiven her for running the worst campaign in civilized history last Jan.)
Voted to retain our recent sales tax hike
Voted to retain the state’s primary law encouraging the construction of affordable housing
Voted to abolish the state’s sales tax on liquor…which I opposed, but have to admit makes a whole lot of sense in the wake of the results last night.
Massachusetts, while very far from perfect (and at least a couple of klicks east of Eden), gets some of the basics: you can’t run a government without a tax base; a commitment to decent schools and adequate health care produce economic and social goods, and as problematic as many of our long-entrenched Dems may be, the GOP cannot be taken seriously as a party of governance.
A bit of backstory: I just moved from one town to another to get to the best public schools I could find for my kid. As we were completing the transaction, my new town voted to raise their own property taxes, in support of the historically excellent schools there. On a block by block basis sanity can be restored. Given the essentially unlimited money available to the bad guys, we have no choice, I think, but to refine a high-low grass-roots strategy–using all the technology that has low barriers to entry, both cost and access — and fighting local fights to make Democrats out of the disaffected.
Or at least, that’s how I’m spinning this morning.
So come on down (or up) folks! – or more seriously there may be some sh*t to glean from this Massachusetts miracle.
Image: Edouard Manet, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” 1881-82