(Apologies to Lynda Barry): A coalition of local government and nonprofit groups has issued its fourth triannual Communities Count report, documenting how King County residents live and/or survive. The full report’s online; a highly condensed version was issued as a tabloid circular in Thursday’s local dailies.
A lot of it’s not pretty, as seen in these headlines from the report’s newsprint version:
“The gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”
“Almost half of all jobs available in King County do not pay a living wage.”
“The richest fifth earn nearly half of the county’s income.”
“Public transportation doesn’t work for working parents.”
“Too many lack health insurance.”
“Domestic violence continues to be a major problem.”
These research-backed statements are based on long-term trends that far predate the current crap in the “larger” economy. The material lives of non-zillionaires have sputtered, stuttered, and slowly sank WHILE the urban condo towers and the suburban McMansions sprouted, while the financial markets boomed, while countless purveyors of “luxury” products and services emerged, while upscale slick local magazines came into print hawking fabulous leisure lifestyles.
(Not necessarily in that order):
I’ve spent the last seven days, with one brief exception, essentially doing five things:
I hadn’t planned on having a minor but pesky cold for the past three weeks. The rest of the ordeal was known.
When I signed up for King County Elections’ tabulation detail, I knew I’d miss the big Election Day hoopla. I’d work in the distant south-end suburbs from 6:30 in the morning to 7 at night, then go straight back by 7 the next morning. Not only would I miss the big action in person, I’d miss it by proxy–we weren’t allowed cell phones, iPods, or other potential media-receiving devices on the sprawling ballot-processing floor. I’d left a cheap FM-only radio with my stuff in the coat-check room, hoping to catch news from the outside world during a dinner break.
As it turned out, there wasn’t anything worth reporting when the dinner break came, shortly after 4 p.m. PST. The NPR airheads simply blathered tastefully about what might or might not happen within the subsequent hour.
Back inside the secure enclave of the tabulation room, the folks in charge decided to hold us for an extra hour. But they gave us tabbers an extra 15-minute break.
Two sheriff’s deputies sit guard at the only entrance to the ballot floor whenever “live” ballots are on the premises. Unlike all the rest of us on the floor, they get a laptop PC with Internet access. So it was thanks to them that, upon leaving for that extra break at 7-ish, I saw the electoral-vote headline OBAMA 200, MCCAIN 85.
We finally got out for the night just before 8. I was carpooling the long lonesome highway back into Seattle when the droning NPR voices announced Obama as the projected winner.
Our vehicle made it up to First and Pike in time to see the overflow crowds starting to form outside the Showbox’s election party. But I chose to head for the Westin Hotel, where the Democrats had their regular post-election shindig. Even before I got there, I witnessed happy shrieks and saw people hugging and fist-bumping all along Virginia Street. Inside, the size of the crowd was exceeded only by its joy. Not only had Washington voters helped Obama over the top, but Gov. Chris Gregoire was winning an unexpectedly not-close re-election campaign. The money issues for parks, transit, and the Pike Place Market were all comfortably in the “Yes” column. The only close big race in the state was Darcy Burner’s second drive to unseat U.S. Rep. Reichert on the Eastside.
I decided to spend someof my little remaining energy trekking to another election bash, at Spitfire. It was also filled close to capacity, and was also outrageously happy. I stayed there just long enough to hear Obama’s oh-so-elequent acceptance speech. During it, the previously raucous crowd stood and sat in total silence, only to wildly applaud at the end.
So that’s what it’s like to to have someone, something, to vote for, not just against.
By 10 p.m. I was already on my way home toward a waiting bed and an alarm clock set for 5 a.m.
It took six days for our county tabulation crew to work through the massive backlog of mailed-in ballots. (The ancient (1994 vintage) server hardware and MS Access database software didn’t help speedwise. The county’s got newer and faster equipment, but the feds haven’t certified it for use.)
People tell me they saw me on KOMO-TV’s election night coverage, gently pushing ballots through a scanning machine. It was one of three stations that sent camera crews to the elections complex that day.
Hundreds of us (mostly temps) worked this election, at the Renton complex and (for probably the last time) at in-person polling places. For me, it was the chance to go somewhere, do something, do it well, and get paid for it–and to apply my compulsion for geeky detail to a worthwhile cause.
As a tabulator, I had about as much to do with the election’s outcome as a stadium scoreboard operator has to do with the making of a big play. I could only properly document what had been done.
Still, there’s some sense of accomplishment in having played one small part in perhaps the most important election of our lifetimes.
Even if I didn’t get to personally witness its most exciting parts.
Here’s what I’m writing for the November Belltown Messenger:
Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship). Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results. What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks: The sprawling beehive of activity that is King County Elections, in an otherwise quiet strip-mall and car-lot district just east of the former Longacres horse-track site, where I’ve worked as a temp this past month. The place was especially exciting on the last day of in-person voter registration, when the line snaked outside the lobby and deep into the parking lot. The reduction of the once-mighty right-wing propaganda machine into ever increasingly-shrill and decreasingly-sane appeals to naked fear and bigotry. The satire industry’s ease at mocking the McCain campaign’s crash and burn, combined with its collective inability to find anything to mock about Barack Obama. (That infamous New Yorker cover spoofed the right’s fictionalized Obama, which had already become absurd.) Bill Maher said it best when he pleaded with Obama to reveal at least one slight aspect of imperfection. (Fret not, Bill: His flaws will appear soon enough.) A tearful late-night phone call I took from a disillusioned Obama supporter. She was fearful that her year of activism and fundraising was all for naught, just because Obama had supported the Wall Street bailout. I tried to console her that bigtime politics has always been a realm of compromise and deals, but it’s far better to have a politician who sometimes betrays his higher ideals than one who doesn’t have any. The various fearful “we’re doomed” cries and sobs in the last weeks, with decreasing relation to the polling trends or the early-voting statistics. These desperate progressives absolutely know the Bushies will steal another election, no matter how improbable.Apocalyptic dread has been part of the American psyche, particularly the left-O-center American psyche, since before I was born. The Bomb was gonna doom us all; then it was the energy crisis; then it was inflation; then it was the Nixon junta. Since then we’ve feared nuclear meltdown, expensive oil, cheap oil, peak oil, the New World Order, Y2K, and the end of the Mayan calendar (not necessarily in that order). But what if we’re not doomed? What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile? What if we win? In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?”
Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship).
Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results.
What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks:
But what if we’re not doomed?
What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile?
What if we win?
In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?”
…for those of us in western Washington’s prog-politix community. Our top regional campaign prospect, Congressional candidate Darcy Burner, lost her home in a fire.
She and her family are safe. But she’ll have to find new digs within her district, at a time when she’s trying to fund a serious election run against incumbent Dave Reichert. That fundraising has gone quite well, particularly with “Netroots” donations from online supporters. Those funds can’t be used for personal expenses, of course. She and her hubby will be arranging to relocate themselves. It’ll be up to her campaign staff, and her campaign supporters, to shoulder more of the campaigning and campaign fundraising work while Burner’s personal time/attention deals with this tragic distraction.
…couple-O-daze for yr. o’b'd’n't web-scribe. I did a marathon temp gig in exotic Renton. (It’s now ended.) I was there, methodically shoving pieces of paper through a machine, when my Evening Magazine segment aired. (They’d promised they’d tell me when it would run; damn.) You may be able to see it at this link.
Other things have happened as well.
…mighty blustery day, here’s what’s nooze:
…anxiously awaits the long-threatened but still nonexistent Snowstorm ‘08, here’s what else has been going on:
Yr. online correspondent was sheltered from Rainstorm 2007 Monday, mostly. I was called back to King County Elections, to tabulate recount votes on a single obscure race for a suburban public-hospital commission.
Of course, I had to get from my place to the bus, and from the bus to the Temporary Elections Annex on Boeing Field property. As I stood and strode amid the heavy precip and the solid gray skies, I though to myself that this was the sort of day that separated us true Nor’Westers from the SoCal weather wimps.
There was one TV in the coat-check room, emanating continuing reports of nature’s sodden fury. But I didn’t hear the full extent of the spectacle until I could get home and get online.
