Wow, lookit it there, Representative Don Young is in a tight race in the primary. Ahhhhh. For all the blustering and bravado, the voters just aren't buying.
What aren't they buying? Not just Mr. Young and the anemic excuses about Coconut Grove, but the same tired message he and others in our delegation have trotted out every time things heat up: "Vote for me because I've been in office forever and you'll lose my seniority and the money that comes with it." That warning has really been it, hasn't it? Can you think of what either Stevens or Young stands for, other than keeping the federal money coming?
Whether those federal funds are justified to help a young state develop or not, all I can remember from either of them is that warning - if they go, so goes the pork.
So, the election. Crap. I'd really hoped Benson would have pulled it off.
Wow, the clean elections proposal got slammed. But there I go forgetting my surroundings again. Alaskans like all sorts of publicly funded projects, but forget about publicly funding state election campaigns.
No surprises that Prop. 4 failed. And frankly, I think the enviromentalists really blew it on this one. They never managed to get their message out, whatever it was beyond protecting salmon. It was strange to see the shift in message late in the game - if they were rolling back the protections stripped out by the Murkowski administration, why didn't they say that from the beginning? Good Lord, no one liked that man by the end, that alone might have garnered them a few more votes.
But letting the dialogue on the measure bog down to 'No one really knows what it will do' surely sealed its fate. And a raspberry to the media who never got beyond that part of the story. Surely, there were some experts (lawyers, most likely) who could have spoken to what the measure would likely do?
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