Posted on 12/16/2009 5:24:41 AM PST by markomalley
The landmark election Saturday of America's first big-city lesbian mayor in Houston represents more than just a milestone in identity politics.
It also signals an unmistakable evolutionary step in national politics, one that provides further evidence of a trend that helped make Barack Obama president: growth-oriented communities like the Texas metropolis, rather than aging big cities or nostalgia-inducing small towns, are setting the course of the country's political direction.
Houston is one of a set of fast-growing cities and expanding suburbs whose changing face and increasingly post-racial politics helped make Barack Obama president. Their politics are defined by some of the same trends—notably, growing Hispanic and Asian populations and the rise of the service sector—that are shaping the nation as a whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Look again
How Barack Obama Won Harris County: Analyzing the Precinct Results
It’s only an undervote if you went to the polls and left the ballot entry blank.
It was “undecided” if you didn’t even go.
Like when they say (A) Support the war, (B) Oppose the war, or (C) Not sure.
It signifies “don’t care” if you aren’t going to go out to the polls in numbers that say “HELL NO I DON’T WANT YOU”. Write in Donald Duck if it makes you feel better.
But if you stay home, you surrendered your vote.
She beat an African American lawyer who was a community organizer.
So yes, Houston is setting a trend.
An anti-Obama trend.
Such perspectives (both for and against) may need to be tempered with a grain of salt.
What we know about so much "history" comes filtered through the bias, perspective, and neglegence of other historians (or even contemporaries of the figure/event being discussed).
So "contradictions" can appear because we may not know enough about motive or even what really happened.
Having seen how so many academics slur Reagan and praise Carter says a lot. And the same can even be said of "contemporary" politicians and journalists' accounts of those years.
Which is why it is nice to be able to go back to someone's original writings where possible.
This is not a defense of Sam Houston, just a discussion about getting information after the fact and trying to form an opinion based on possibly unreliable accounts.
She also beat a Hispanic Republican, a millionaire property investor, and a plumber who’s run for mayor more than any other Houston candidate.
Barack Obama ran to the center in 2008 too.
No one has beat any of the incumbents since term limits began.
Hell, no one even bothered to run against Bill White's re-election.
Such money comes with strings attached.
“inner city” voters are ‘supposed’ to vote for the black guy, not the one who is counter to their church beliefs.
They stayed home. Gene Locke says that he didn’t get his base out to vote.
This message has been brought to you by the Department of Accurate Historical Facts, formerly known as the department of revisionists.
“Stay home and you get what you deserve, the expansion of Big-City liberalism.”
I share your frustration, seeing it first-hand as well in Austin... it’s a vicious cycle of liberal power that leaves many voters simply disenfranchised and not participating. I’m just explaining how it goes.
Partner benefits was voted down in Austin in the mid-1990s, but was *quietly* passed by wide margin last year. And yes, you WILL be getting Green Nonsense, like energy audits and million dollar boondoggles and reqts to paint roofs white... Houston, you have a problem!
Now what SHOULD happen is the Republicans need to stop being idiots and start smartening up and get behind ONE GOOD candidate, who at least makes it to the runoff. We COULD win these things.
No. I don’t believe that. The voters are being offered nothing to vote for. The elections are being rigged big time now.
That's part of the reason I'm a compulsive used book store prowler. I love to have multiple accounts, written in multiple different eras. If you get enough different accounts and enough different opinions, you can almost begin to discern a line of truth.
Houston is so interesting because he has these high profile public periods that are quite documented, followed by periods that are nearly blank (Like his actions after the strange dissolution of his first marriage - gone Indian? gone alcoholic? gone Indian/alcoholic?).
I guess then I missed a lot of that...But then again I knew I was going to be in the middle of all of it when the polls opened...
I knew who was who even before the November 3rd election...
After that, it didn’t mean much to me, and for some “conservatives” to feel like they just had to endorse one of the two mayoral candidates left just boggled muh mind...
I’m sure if the roles had been reversed, the democrats would have been jumping at the chance to do the same for us, even when they didn’t have a horse in the race anymore...
We’ll just have to see how well all of this lovey dovey stuff goes when everyone antes up when counsel meets again...
This is true...
We had three at large positions on counsel, and the controller position...
The mayors runnoff got an “ignore” as did one of the at-large positions because we knew they were going to go liberal anyway...
And for what its worth, I believe the city counsel has the most “conservative” seats it ever has had as I can recall...
If they ever decide to cut the damn cord that connects district “E”, that will create another potential “conservative” seat, but Mayor White, and Parker now will probably do what they can to keep that from happening...
It appears we have broken even, and the mess has only really been pushed to another corner...
That’s just what I see at this point...
Yeah, I saw that...Muh bad...
All I know is I have the “tally” strip (that is my copy to keep) from the ‘08 general, and my precinct stayed red by a pretty good margin...
Guess we won’t be on the Christmas card list this year...
It’s an old problem...
Some Words With A Mummy (1850) - by Edgar Allan Poe:
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-some.htm
(excerpt)
“Will you be kind enough to explain,” I said, “what you mean by ‘purposely so embalmed’?”
“With great pleasure!” answered the Mummy, after surveying me leisurely through his eye-glass–for it was the first time I had ventured to address him a direct question.
“With great pleasure,” he said. “The usual duration of man’s life, in my time, was about eight hundred years. Few men died, unless by most extraordinary accident, before the age of six hundred; few lived longer than a decade of centuries; but eight were considered the natural term. After the discovery of the embalming principle, as I have already described it to you, it occurred to our philosophers that a laudable curiosity might be gratified, and, at the same time, the interests of science much advanced, by living this natural term in installments. In the case of history, indeed, experience demonstrated that something of this kind was indispensable. An historian, for example, having attained the age of five hundred, would write a book with great labor and then get himself carefully embalmed; leaving instructions to his executors pro tem., that they should cause him to be revivified after the lapse of a certain period–say five or six hundred years. Resuming existence at the expiration of this time, he would invariably find his great work converted into a species of hap-hazard note-book–that is to say, into a kind of literary arena for the conflicting guesses, riddles, and personal squabbles of whole herds of exasperated commentators. These guesses, etc., which passed under the name of annotations, or emendations, were found so completely to have enveloped, distorted, and overwhelmed the text, that the author had to go about with a lantern to discover his own book. When discovered, it was never worth the trouble of the search. After re-writing it throughout, it was regarded as the bounden duty of the historian to set himself to work immediately in correcting, from his own private knowledge and experience, the traditions of the day concerning the epoch at which he had originally lived. Now this process of re-scription and personal rectification, pursued by various individual sages from time to time, had the effect of preventing our history from degenerating into absolute fable...”
Depends on what you call “rigging”. Does that include the Harris County Republican Party not venturing mayoral candidates against Bill White?
Houston now rivals New Orleans as the Gay “Meccca” of the Gulf Coast. There’e a huge gay population now. Add the Blacks, Mexicans and “Asians” and you have a large majority of Democrats in the city. Even large enough to carry Harris County. A Dim I know told me several years ago that about 10,000 Republicans a month were moving out to neighboring Conservative counties. (Hell, I’m one of ‘em!)
When I saw the election results of 2006, I beieved him. Obama lost Montgomery County by over 80,000 votes for example while Harris County went Dim, although somewhat narrowly.
As a former Houstonian for 30+ years, I’m sad to say that ordinary White Conservative voters are now hopelessly outnumbered in Houston.
Here in Chambers County, The Pubbies carried the County with about 75%+ of the vote. Which means that that Blacks voted virtually 100% for Obama while the Whites voted over 90% for McCain. No polarization there. LOL!
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