Do As Madonna Says, Not As She Does. Or Doesn't

Dad and I just got back from voting at the local firehouse here in Plumstead Township. We were numbers 332 and 333, which for eleven o'clock in the morning is all but unprecedented. I'll be absolutely flabbergasted if the Dems suffer defeat at the top of the ticket here in Pennsylvania. Ed Rendell ("he'd show up for the opening of a can of beans" --my Dad) is just about assured a second term as governor, and Bob Casey has been ahead in the polls over Rick Santorum almost from the moment that he declared.

And I'm hoping hoping hoping that going down to sure defeat at the top of the ticket will depress Republican voter turn out. Because the race that I'm really interested in is the Pennsylvania 8th Congressional District, where Iraq War Vet Patrick Murphy is seeking to unseat the incumbent Republican, Mike Fitzpatrick.

I hate Mike Fitzpatrick. He went to Congress after a lackluster career as a Bucks County Commissioner, who summed up his career by saying, "I kept taxes down." And hasn't done much in Congress other than a couple of idiotic protect-our-precious-children-from-the-predations-of-the-internet bills. The Republican Party in Bucks County is a machine run by one man, Harry Fawkes. He decides who gets to run for office for every seat in the county. It's nuts.

Even though Murphy is ten years my junior (I am officially Old because of that, right?), he's a bright guy with some good ideas and a lot of pluck.

Whether he'll pull it out is another story. It's not so much that local Republicans are all about loving what's going on in Iraq. It's more the case that they think that if a Democrat wins, there will be a knock on the door in the middle of the night shortly thereafter and somebody will be there to take away their guns and they won't be able to go deer hunting. (I swear, that's almost verbatim.)

If I was a local Dem strategist, I'd introduce the idea of opening up all the lands set aside for preservation around here (which is a great idea to slow the pace of development) for hunting. Lord knows we can spare the deer, and it might assuage those fears.

But we'll see.

For now, I'm off to work.

---