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assorted wrongdoings by the initiative's pusher.Then, by convincing margins, the voters of Maine, Nebraska, and Oregon said no to TABOR's ideological malevolence.
Meanwhile, there was widespread positive news on the initiative front. The most resounding victories came in all six states which had initiatives to increase the minimum wage. Voters said "yes" in Arizona (66 percent approval), Colorado (53 percent), Missouri (76 percent), Montana (73 percent), Nevada (69 percent), and Ohio (56 percent). In all the states but Nevada, the initiatives also required that the minimum wage be adjusted annually for inflation. Voters in Arizona and Nebraska (supposedly antitax, bright-red states) approved initiatives to increase funding for early childhood education. Washington State voted to require that big utilities produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Oregon expanded access to a prescriptiondrug program for the uninsured, and Missouri okayed funding for stemcell research.
Secretaries of state
Amazingly, America still can't seem to get this democracy thing down. People are actively discouraged from voting, and votes aren't counted as the voter intended. There were no total meltdowns this year (à la Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004), but serious problems persisted. Outrageous electronic voting "glitches," disgraceful voter intimidation and suppression, and crass purges of voter rolls continue to be a plague on our country's democratic pretensions.
Some of the problems turned comical. In Ohio, Republican Congress critter Steve Chabot was turned away from voting because the address on his ID differed from the one on his registration card; the top election official in Missouri was asked three times to show a photo ID in order to vote, even though state law does not require one; and Gov. Mark Sanford was sent away from his South Carolina polling place because he showed up without his registration card.
Then there's the ghost of Katherine Harris. As Florida's secretary of state in 2000, she infamously rigged the vote count for George W. She then went to Congress, and this year she ran for (and lost) a U.S. Senate seat. But her bad mojo reached out and touched the election to replace her in the House. Touch-screen voting machines which she had championed as secretary of state appear to have malfunctioned on November 7 in her old congressional district, erasing the votes of some 18,000 people. Only 373 votes separated the two candidates, so a recount is underway. However, since there's no paper trail to these machines, it'll be hard to prove that all those people didn't just fail to vote in this particular race. This sort of ridiculous stuff is why the little-known office of the secretary of state is key to getting a grip on our democracy -- and why progressives ran for these offices in seven states this fall, winning in Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. In Minnesota, my old friend Mark Ritchie ousted an eight-year incumbent who had turned the office into an electioneering wing of the Republican party. Crisscrossing the state, Mark tapped into a deep well of anger about the lack of fairness and integrity in the voting system and will now do the work needed to restore people's faith.
What now?
On the plus side, some good people are going to be in positions to do good things in Congress. Speaker-tobe Nancy Pelosi has come out with a "First Hundred Hours" agenda that ranges from passing a new minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to breaking the corruption ties between lobbyists and legislation. And nearly everyone except "Slow Joe" Lieberman seems to realize that Bush's war is wrong and we must get out of it--pronto.
Also, there are some promising changes in who runs Congress's committees, such as John Conyers (Judiciary), David Obey (Appropriations), George Miller (Education and the Workforce), Henry Waxman (Government Reform), Nydia Velázquez (Small Business), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Bob Filner (Veterans' Affairs), and Charlie Rangel (Ways and Means).
On the down side, there are still too many go-slow, don't-rock-theboat, weak-kneed, money-grubbing, corporatized Democrats who won't break their habits of bedding down with the lobbyists and even the Bushites. They will push hard from inside the Democratic Caucus (while the White House, the money interests and the establishment media pushes from outside) for the majority to "be nice," move to the corporate right, and agree from the start to surrender half of what they want (and then compromise down from there).
Now is the time for progressives to be more vigilant than ever -- focus on what the Democrats are doing and not doing, make loud and clear demands that they do more, and keep organizing at the grassroots level. Just a few months ago, George W. declared, "I'm the decider." No, he's not. Neither are the Democrats. You are.
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