It was hot today in Hampton. The Hampton Democrats put up a tent in a Mill Road backyard and heard from three candidates for governor and one for US House of Representatives.
The crowd, as usual was compromised mostly of sixty to seventy somethings, but there were younger people as well, and spirits were high, despite the heavy weight of the heat.
The governor of Connecticut showed up, with his security people with the ear pieces and the vigilant looks and the governor gave a stirring speech about how the Republicans are intent on destroying government and all the good things it does in the name of some cockamamie idea of "freedom."
I met a man running for sheriff, who was a Republican last election but could not abide the government haters, and so he switched parties.
Maggie Hassan gave one of those polished, focus group tested speeches with which I could agree, but somehow I could not see her persuading anyone with that who was not already a solid Democrat. A man named Kennedy got up and introduced himself as a candidate for governor and said he favored an income tax and legalization of marijuana. You might say he dug in on the left flank. He sort of lost me when he said, "I often shoot from the hip, but always from the heart."
Then Jackie Cilley got up and really started shooting, not from the hip, but raising that gun to the chin and letting loose with both barrels. This is the Jackie Cilley who will bar the door against the zombies who keep trying to rise up from the dead and break the house down with their efforts to destroy the tax base of New Hampshire.
Cilley has refused to take the pledge to never impose an income tax because she thinks it's a cowardly, destructive and ultimately immoral thing to do. What you are doing, essentially, when you grandstand and promise never to approve an income tax is to say, "Okay, I've got this gun, but it's not loaded. So now drop yours."
She identified about a dozen ways other than income taxes you could raise enough revenue to run the state government, but none of these proposals will even get a hearing if you don't have the threat of an income tax to hold against the temples of 425 legislators in Concord.
"We've got t consider what will happen when we actually do win this election," Cilley said. "Then we have to govern."
The Republicons are, of course, only concerned with winning. They have no interest in actually governing. They promise no taxes and then they cannot govern. They replace big government with really bad government.
I spoke with Chris Muns, who is running from Hampton for a seat in the House at Concord. He'd seen the disaster of the 2010 election, when Democrats were swept from Concord and replaced with people who believe birth control pills cause prostate cancer and vaccines cause mental retardation.
I asked him why he had not given up trying to save this state, which persists in trying to walk back through some time warp, to get back to the 19th century. He shrugged and said we'd never move forward if we give up.
Carol Shea Porter drifted by and she did not say, "I told you so," when I mentioned Frank Guinta, who beat her for the US House seat last time, has said he wants to destroy Social Security so thoroughly his own children will never learn that it ever existed. He wants "private enterprise to lead the way," whatever that means. Ms. Shea Porter just smiled and said, "Vote."
So, there are people out there who continue to fight.
It has been comforting to read A Stillness At Appomattox which depicts the voting in the Union Army during 1864, when the army had been beaten repeatedly, when the government of the people, by the people, for the people seemed to be to be a ship going down in stormy waters. But the Army, which had loved its little dandy of a general, George McClellan, who was running against Lincoln, lined up and voted overwhelmingly against their darling and for Lincoln. They sensed, or reasoned, some how concluded, the work they had done together over the three prior years of immense tumult and sacrifice and loss had to be continued. They were staggering, but they had not given up on the idea of Union, on the possibilities of government and they voted to continue the fight.
And so it was a Southern Cause, the cause of aristocracy, slaves, fairy tales of chivalry which masked the bullwhips cracking and the iron shackles and chains and the fact that less than 20% of the population even owned slaves, that pixie dust monster was finally brought down and a stake driven through its heart.
So, in the end, because it has happened before, maybe there is a reason to believe, it can happen again: Maybe this great experiment of a government of the people, by the people, for the people may not perish from the earth.
PS: Here's the link to the zombie ad. It's fun.
http://youtu.be/kTZMTTcvTm8
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