Isaac Laquedem

The national elections of 2014, summed up in one sentence

One of the refreshing surprises of the 2014 congressional elections was to see how so many of America's working classes and family farmers gave Congress a resounding mandate to protect the rich from starvation.

Isaac visits the Nixon Library and finds facts of all sorts

The tour guide at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, an energetic and enthusiastic woman of about Isaac's vintage, painted a sympathetic portrait of our 37th president.  For example, she described the 1960 presidential election as a contest between a highly intelligent vice president seasoned with eight years in the administration, experienced in foreign policy, with a steady hand, against a naive and inexperienced playboy.  She did reluctantly admit that John Kennedy was handsome and attractive, and Richard Nixon . . . "well, he had to work with what he had."  The Nixon Library did have a remarkably fair and balanced depiction of Watergate and the events that led up to President Nixon resigning the office, installed after Mr. Nixon died to replace the exhibit that he had approved.

Three things struck me.  One was when our guide, in talking about the famous people who had visited the Nixon Library, told us that Justice Brennan had visited the Library a year or two ago and was very impressed with it.  Justice Brennan died in 1997.  The second thing was when she mentioned that the British had burned the White House in World War II, conflating a war in which we were allies with a war 130 years earlier in which we weren't.

The third thing was one of the delicious ironies which is either a complete coincidence or the result of an Isaac-like humorist at work behind the scenes.  On the bus to the Library, our group was shown a half-hour film about President Nixon, produced in the early 1990s with the President's cooperation.  (He died in 1994.)  The film had to discuss the Watergate scandal, which it did -- almost exactly 18-1/2 minutes after the film started.  A coincidence?  You be the judge.

Our November election day: a remembrance of Guy Fawkes?

I've sometimes wondered if the Congress of 1845 wasn't showing a bit of collective spirit when it set our national election day to be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November - hence always on or between November 2 and November 8 - because the central day of that span, November 5, had been celebrated in England as a day of Thanksgiving since 1606 by reason of the discovery on November 5, 1605 of a plot to create hundreds of vacancies in the House of Lords by setting off a large gunpowder charge in the building's basement.  Later known as Gunpowder Treason Day, it is now celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day.  Standard historians say that Congress chose that week in November because it allowed enough time between Election Day and the date in December on which the presidential electors gather in the state capitols to cast their ballots, but I like to think that Congress was, in a sly way, fixing our election date to commemorate the day, 240 years earlier, on which the spiritual ancestors of the United States Senate were saved from a treasonous attempt to impose term limits.

Six counties favored marijuana over Gov. Kitzhaber. Two make sense. Why the other four?

I haven't figured out a larger societal principle from comparing Governor Kitzhaber's election results today with those of the marijuana measure, but I think there's something interesting lurking in the data.  Measured by percentages, the Governor outpolled legal weed by a noticeable margin only in ultra-conservative Wheeler County.  Marijuana outpolled Dr. Kitzhaber by a consistent margin in most of our other counties, and by 10 points or more in six conservative counties around the east and south edges of the state: Baker, Curry, Harney, Josephine, Klamath, and Lake.  I understand the appeal of legal marijuana in Curry and Josephine Counties, where the stuff is said to grow well and may be the largest  cash crop in the area, but I don't have a theory for why the marijuana measure outpolled the governor in Baker, Harney, Klamath, and Lake Counties.  It may be that the good voters of those four counties believed that four years of a Dennis Richardson administration would be easier to take with a toke.

Kitzhaber wins re-election, but shouldn't crow about it

The Oregonian has called the governor's race for John Kitzhaber, who has 48.8% of the reported vote compared to 45.7% for Dennis Richardson and 5.6% for the other four candidates and write-ins.  Dr. Kitzhaber leads by 30,000 in the actual voting.

Isaac agrees with the Oregonian's call.  When all the votes are counted, Dr. Kitzhaber will have received about 808,000 votes, against 706,000 votes for Mr. Richardson.  The governor's margin will widen almost entirely because Multnomah County has many votes yet to count, and the uncounted vote in Multnomah County will add another 83,000 votes to the governor's margin, just enough to get him above the 50% mark.  Isaac predicts that he will end up with 50.8% of the vote against 44.9% for Mr. Richardson.

Yet Governor Kitzhaber shouldn't be complacent about winning.  Had the race continued another three weeks, he might well have lost.  He will carry only eight of Oregon's 36 counties (two of those by less than a majority), and is trailing in counties that he should have won, such as Clackamas, Marion, and Linn.  He will win the race only because of his strong showing in Multnomah County, where he is receiving 70% of the vote.  If Multnomah County didn't count, Dennis Richardson would be the next governor.  Put another way, in Multnomah County he's running barely evenly with legalizing marijuana, and he's well behind legal marijuana in most of the rest of the state.  He has a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the state in the next four years.  Good luck, Governor; you will need it.