| November 7, 2012 | Contact | Calendar | The Mix | Archives |
The Obama Mama and her shrine. The Romney campaign obviously underestimated the power of a votive candle. Our friend Melanie's 93 year old mother had a great night last night. So did I and lots of friends. It was all boom boom pow. Historic tipping points and validation of math-based reality. Democrats in Maine took back the legislature. Brian Jones beat Ryan Harmon. Susan Longely won. Same-sex marriage won. It was several hours of intense information processing: TV channel switching and blog reading and facebooking. It was like opening a giant present every few minutes as states were called and great folks including some terrific women (Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Tammy Duckworth and whoever was running against the rape wingnuts) were declared winners.
Today I noticed that I had little muscle knots in places from days of anxiety about the election. I'm a big Nate Silver fan, but I was worried about several pundits projecting Romney wins, based on nothing it turns out. It is good to be back to a single working version of reality in which an inclusive coalition wins out over the shrinking minority of angry white guys. It is good to see my state of Maine as a part of that coalition, to see that we are what I thought we were.
For the first time, Unity had a vote counting machine, just a scanner with a dedicated touch screen computer. Previously it took several pairs of Dem/Repub human counters a few hours to tally ballots. Last night, no counters were required and they were done an hour after the polls closed. I snapped a photo of a tally sheet and posted it to unitymaine.org and called in the results to the democrats. 989 people voted, 801 of whom voted yesterday. It was Obama 479 and Romney 443. Our part of the state is pretty conservative, but Unity is home to a small college and they have a wonderful tradition of marching down the hill to town to vote.
Monday I was in Portland to interview a third candidate for my Java developer job. Another excellent candidate, but they seem to quickly take other jobs after interviewing with us. Maybe they are looking for a team-oriented, collegial workplace and sense that we have an interchangeable cogs commodity approach with separation of management and worker bees. Or maybe the demand for Java developers in the southern part of the state gives them a lot of choices. |
Home made signs are the best. We saw this one in Thorndike on the way to a celebratory breakfast.
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