It could be a great day

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

It’s Monday. Tomorrow is Election Day. If you’ve known me any time at all, you’ll know I really despise party politics. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens and the Independent American Party—I’m an equal opportunity despiser. You can count on the fingers of two hands (and maybe a foot) the number of party politicians for whom I have respect. I’m about as socially liberal as they come, but I’m careful about money and big, authoritarian government—that makes me a fairly typical Nevada voter.

That being said, I’m hoping (but not betting) that at least one house of Congress turns blue. Anything, anything, to put the brakes on this broke-dick administration. I’ll tell you right now, if either house goes, none of this country’s business will get completed for two years. It’ll be miserable, about like a broken bone healing.

As has happened in the past, though, I feel like I’m living in an echo chamber. It’s the exact feeling I had before the last election. It was this feeling that was the genesis of the Right Hook column. Specifically, it was the Bush-Kerry election when a lot of people I respect, old and new media, and random e-mailers were telling me that Kerry was going to take Nevada, but the people I was talking to in bars and on the street were telling me they were going with Bush. In other words, the people who most needed to know that Bush was likely to win (so they could help with Get Out the Vote efforts, phone calling, sign-hanging, whatever) were hearing they didn’t have to make any special efforts to help.

This media hype that the Democrats are going to sweep the country may only decrease the votes among Democrats. We’ll see. But the incipient sweep is all I’ve been hearing, except from our friend Mike Lafferty, who points out in this week’s column a bottom-line assessment: Republicans outvoted Democrats in early voting, 47-39 percent.

I guess we’ll all know most of the answers by Wednesday morning.