Election 2009; Glenn Beck's Race Baiting

Assorted thoughts:

Some gains and some losses. Gains are summarized here; most notably, Referendum 71 in Washington, which establishes domestic partnerships as equal to marriage in all but name, appears to have passed by two points. The most notable loss is, of course, Maine, where the pro-marriage side lost by almost six points.

What we learned from Maine. Main(e)ly, that even a good grassroots campaign that's willing to show the real people that the issue affects and to combat the other side's lies won't always win. Or perhaps that it takes a campaign almost entirely funded by the religious establishment, which breaks financial disclosure laws and lies in all its ads, in order to beat that campaign.



I admit that the standard comfort of "the voters who supported it are old and time will bring equality" isn't too helpful on a day like this.

(Commenter Alex at the BTB link does make the ironic point that the right-wingers' push to strip a minority of their civil rights "because otherwise the children would have to hear about it in school" will be the subject of every social studies class discussion today.)

Not election-related, and I don't like to talk about Glenn Beck, but I was linked this so I might as well: Much has been made of Beck's ranting yesterday that black Obama supporters were "taught to be slaves," and its obvious offensiveness to descendants of slaves who still feel the effects of slavery. While his subsequent comment that progressives like Andy Stern (of the SEIU) were "taking 'you' to a place to be slaughtered" has likewise been called out for being an obvious lie, I haven't seen the same criticism made about its race-baiting - Andy Stern is Jewish, and that absolutely reads as a Holocaust reference. As if those weren't prevalent enough already with right-wingers crying that the President will put them in concentration camps and that health care reform is like a Nazi plan.