The picture is of the Oakland Coliseum before a recent A's home game. The sky is orange because the state's on fire. The "fans" are cardboard cutouts because . . . you know. It looks like Mars, or hell, or a scene from a dystopian sci-fi flick. Just Oakland, 2020, however.
It seems like this would be a poor environment for an incumbent seeking re-election, but California and Oregon are just two states, neither red nor swing. In the kind of election where the winner gets the most votes, it would matter to the current occupant whether he was the choice of 30 percent or just 25 percent of people living within 50 miles of the Pacific Ocean. That's not how we do it, however. If you can't persuade half of them, tell the people who live somewhere else about the pathetic a-holes who don't agree with you.
Thought experiment: imagine that Pennsylvania was burning. I don't think we'd hear so much about the forest management skills of its governor or the crazed environmentalists who reside in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The ongoing effort to split the country apart is almost comical on account of the obvious falsehoods that are pressed into service and then repeated by guys named Travis. "Mitch McConnell Says 'No' to Blue-State Bailouts"—as if Kentucky had not since time immemorial been scooping up tax money collected in places like New York State. When Republicans complain bitterly about "socialism," they don't have in mind the steady flow of federal tax dollars from blue states to red ones.
Comments