Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Kiss Me, I Plan on Voting: I still have to vote in the Virginia gubernatorial election today. Normally I do my voting in the morning, but I decided instead to spend the early hours taking photographs of the leaves changing colors on the Potomac River from the Key Bridge.

It's hard to get excited about this race. I'm all for bipartisanship, but I'm still upset that Republicans and Democrats decided together to raise our taxes, only to find out that the state experienced record surpluses immediately afterwards. I would gladly vote for anyone who promised to finally get rid of the god-forsaken car tax, but none of the three candidates have even mentioned it.

While I'm blasé about this election, the rest of the nation seems to be watching it with rapt attention. Once again, some local event is supposed to serve as the political bellwether for the entire country. In this case, Democratic candidate Tim Kaine is expected to eke out a victory, and this is supposed to mean that Bush and the Republicans are toast in the coming midterm elections.

NPR said as much this morning, noting that Virginia is a Republican state that voted heavily for Bush both times. Nevermind that a Democrat, Mark Warner, was also elected governor during that time. And when the NPR segment turned to the New York mayoral election, the fact that a Republican stands to be re-elected in a heavily Democratic city didn't seem to warrant any talk of national implications.

Putting aside any talk of liberal bias in the media, we should just leave local elections to what they are -- local elections. For some reason, the media always finds reasons to predict that the Republican dominance is over and the voters are going to turn in droves to the Democrats. And time after time, the Democrats go on to lose.

Now, I know no party will dominate politics forever (Thank God). But let's study the actual presidential and congressional elections, not all these side shows.