GOP Armageddon! Whatever...

[Election day here in California and seven other states. Yawn. Yes, the party which I marked on my first voter registration form (Sonoma City Hall, 1987) is choosing its gubernatorial nominee, and there are lots of no doubt important stuff on my ballot. Again, yawn. I'll vote, but it won't be with the same geeky enthusiasm that I've brought to the booth in the past. My electoral predictions are always eerily wrong, so I feel no qualms in predicting that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be re-elected in November, even if the greatly hoped-for anti-Republican putsch does happen.]

[One contest, of course, holds my interest. I'm sure you are reminded, as am I, of the 1933 by-election in London's East Fulham parliamentary constituency. As we all know, the Labour Party turned around a large Conservative majority there to take the seat. In the wake of Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Hitler's rise to power in '33, and a revived consciousness of the horrors of World War I, most observers saw the result as an indication that most Britons were pacifist. Appeasement of the Nazis became the British government's policy until the Germans invaded Poland six years later. Later analysis (including by the Great Appeaser himself, Neville Chamberlain) indicated that the actual issue that drove voters to go with Labour wasn't pacificism but outrage at soemthing called the "means test," a then-novel tax structure of the coalition government then in power.]

[If la Busby does manage to pull it off, I just know certain quarters will crow that GOP armageddon is nigh: if conservative San Diegans vote this way, every issue from the border to Iraq will go topsy-turvy! Cats and dogs, sleeping together! Let's calm down, people; the only reason she's got a chance is the Cunningham scandal and the associations voters might make with other sleazy Reuplicans like DeLay. While seeing Busby elected will make me happy, I think the pundits will make way too much of the result, whatever it may be. It's still too long until November; something's bound to happen to mix things up again.]

[(OK, OK; I took two sequential British history classes at UCSB as part of the English major. While I didn't perform particularly well at the time, the two texts on which the professor relied, while conservative and somewhat outdated from any (post)modern standard, still form my basic understanding of the facts as they occurred.)]

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