Here in Virginia, we are still trying to recover from the disastrous results at both the state and local levels. But beyond even that, many of us who were at our precinct voting places all day were subject to the kind of totally unexpected and unprecedented and widespread abuse, and we are still trying to understand and recover from that too. And what I see clearly is that it was an extension and continuation of the mindset (and I hesitate to include the word "mind" at all) of the Teabagger town hall meeting disrupters, except that this seems to have filtered down to the ReThug general voting population.
UPDATE: How could I forget the event which really sums all this up: the "winner" in delegate race, Tom Rust, hung up on Stevens Miller when he was in the midst of his concession phone call, as he was talking about cooperation "I don't want to talk anymore, bye." These people have NO CLASS at all, do they?
More under the fold.....
So we start with the early morning hours when we were still sweet and innocent as to the results, giving out ballots, doing what we thought we were supposed to do under our democratic way of life:
Hey, we even hammed it up a bit (the donut, provided by the Young Dems of VA, were excellent):
It wasn't long after this then who we later found out was an employee of McNair Elementary School, the polling place, passed by. I offered her a "Democratic sample ballot" and she sneered. I said "be polite now," to which she responded, loudly, "screw all of you." A hint of things yet to come.
By the way, here are yours truly, Stevens Miller, our incredible candidate for the Virgina House of Delegates, and Joe Montano, who was in charge of the northern Virginia field effort for Deeds. This was 9 days previous at a wonderful campaign stop we made at a Baptist church in our precinct.
So then the shock continued. On at least 8 or 9 occasions, when offering the ballot, I was called a socialist or communist. Loud and angry. Not the majority, mind you, but enough to be embarrassing even to the Republican representatives who were there handing out ballots of their own. Finally, I responded to such a tirade with a speech I had been practicing mentally: "You know that our servicemen and women have fought and died for the right to do what we are doing here on election day," to which the man, white, late 40ish, inexplicably pointed to his shoulder, which, he was probably imagining, had all sorts of stripes on it, and yelled: "Yes, and I was one of them!" Right. At this exact moment the (un)Coordinated Campaign called to say they wanted the vote numbers early....not wanting to actually confront this moron, and feeling my face blazing read and imagining I was getting close to a stroke or such, I retreated to the "boys" room and splashed cold water on my face for quite some time before going in to get the vote. And, the vote was looking pretty good, since my precinct is typically 65/35 Dem and the numbers were decent.
But not good enough, so the Miller campaign started to "pull" and me and my volunteers started to call everyone we knew. I felt really good when my two neighbors, both of them who had become citizens within the last year, appeared to vote:
Well, the results were a 25% turnout (good for an "off year" believe it or not) with 53/47% for our delegate candidate in one precinct and 60/40 in the other, smaller, precinct of which Sally and I are co-captains. At that point we knew it was all over, and of course we were correct. As to the abuse, I thought perhaps this was a local anomaly, until one of my fellow precinct captains posted this in an email that night, in part:
I have never before seen the level of hostility and outright boorishness that some Republican voters exhibited today. These are adult men and women in the 40s, 50s and 60s who were rude to me and my volunteers, full of sarcastic comments, trying to bump into us, trying to swat away our sample ballots as we handed them to them. I had a birther/teabagger out who really made a fool of herself to the point that the Republican volunteer standing beside me said she was embarrassed there were Republicans like that. And she was a white woman in her mid-50s, who was driving a Mercedes with Maryland tags who parked illegally while going in to vote. What a model of integrity there, I'm sure she would have tried to run over any squirrel that got in her way today.
I've heard from multiple people that this was pretty widespread, even over in Reston. I can understand Republicans being excited, they haven't won anything in Fairfax for years. But when you see grown adults - all white, all late middle-aged to elderly - acting like 5th-grade bullies, it just really rubbed me the wrong way. Not that some of the Dem voters were a bit rude as well, but I've never seen one of our guys take a sample ballot, see that it's the other side's, crinkle it up and throw it back. Or taking photo's from the parking lot and yelling "don't tread on me" or whatever bullshit they're yelling this week. Getting called a communist, that kind of crap - other than flipping off the one taking the pics, I really had to restrain myself quite a few times today. They were even getting on some of my high school kids - grown adults giving lip to a 15-year old kid handing out Democratic sample ballots. Just pathetic.
So it seems to me that the horrible mindsets of the Teabaggers, who, on a local level, had disrupted a TownHall meeting that I had attended, has filtered down and infiltrated the minds of even your basic Republican. I mean, even if they didn't verbalize it, I could see the hostility in the eyes of almost all those who passed me by and took the Republican ballot instead. I mean, what's that all about?? These people not only don't understand the meaning of patriotism, they are, in fact, by their actions, traitors. They would, ironically, feel a LOT more comfortable living in a dictatorship. I can only hope that dictatorship will be in a country other than our own.