BJ's Post-Election Coverage

A series of pieces in the BJ yesterday and today wrapping up the election results. Today finds a story about 21-year-old would-be wunderkind James Hardy who won big in the School Board race, along with a personal data sidebar. Hardy . . . campaigned. Which is to say he did far more than any other candidate. He bought billboards, he has a website with a blog, he had poll-greeters. Everyone had a lot of enthusiasm.

Will this translate into actual success on the Board? Time will tell. I do know that when the local Kerry campaign tried to work with College Dems when he was president last year, he didn't exactly set the world on fire. The main plank in his platform -- lobby the State to fund schools better -- sounds good, but I can tell him from experience that the education community hit the GA hard last year and they still hosed us.

What he definitely bring to the party is a political organization populated by loyal personal friends. A couple of them worked the polling place where I was greeting for RON Tuesday afternoon. They had a lot of energy. They jumped in the water and scared all the fish away, but they did it with energy. Hopefully, they will show up en masse for the next levy campaign. If they don't, the House of Pho will not be happy.

Speaking of the levy campaign, the BJ has the read-it-and-weep ward-by-ward breakdown. By their analysis, the levy did worse than the last one -- not surprising since the last one won. Clearly we have a lot of work to do.

First and certainly least is the Michael Douglas op-ed yesterday entitled "There They Go Again. Ohio Democrats Just Don't Get It." The evidence that we don't get it? Well first, that RON did so badly. Do we really have to rehash this again? People who liked RON were mostly Democrats. But establishment Democrats -- the ones that don't get it -- either stayed on the sidelines or joined the other team. He also cites the Sherrod Brown plagarism scandalette and Marc Dann's apparently strident announcement that he is running for Attorney General.

Like all op-ed writers, Douglas likes a meta-story. Like too many op-ed writers, he will cram facts into a meta-story that don't fit there, and ignore facts that disprove it. This is a good example. To my knowledge, neither Paul Hackett nor Subodh Chandra embarassed himself last week. All over the state Democratic candidates saw gains. Meanwhile, in Douglas's backyard, four Democrats ran the smartest judicial election campaign since I've been back in town. And they were helped by Edna Boyle's ill-considered race card play and Arshnikoff being Arshnikoff.

Those Republicans just don't get it.