Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Infantile

The state Republican party is throwing a tantrum over Governor Richardson's travel plans to Virginia and New Jersey to support Democratic Governors candidates. Here is part of a story from the Albuquerque Journal this morning, " Marta Kramer, executive director of the state GOP, said in a statement that Richardson is trying to advance his own political career. "Why else would our self-professed 'moderate' governor be showing his true colors by supporting the most liberal gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history?"

Does th
is officially denote whining? Does this constitute an infantile tantrum? I think it really is minor league stuff and shows the weakness of the GOP in this state right now. As I recall, Governor Johnson did the same thing on both political and issue travel while Governor.

Minimum Wage Post Mortem

Brian Sanderoff of Research and Polling Inc. has come out with his analysis of the recent municipal election. He pretty much had all races and issues figured out, as usual, before election day except for the minimum wage ballot question. His pre election polling and exit polling on election day showed the issue winning. It failed and I think the reason is that people would just not want to admit they voted against something like that. So they lied to the pollers.

Also, in the city council districts where the issue got a good majority of the votes there were only about 7,500 votes cast. In the districts where it did not do well the voter turn out was about 11,500 votes. Do the math.

Once again, the well funded unscrupulous campaign by the Chamber of Commerce is what really carried the day against the minimum wage. I wonder once again if they will reach out to heal the wounds they caused in this community. There is a lot of negative feelings out there about them right now, and rightly so.


1 comment:

Voodoo Child said...

Mr. Baca,

I have to disagree with your second assessment, about the Chamber of Commerce's "unscrupulous" campaigning. It wasn't any more unscrupulous than the shaky campaigning against the 2003 road bond vote (which liberals have lauded as a "hard fought battle"). It's more a case of the left getting defeated by its own strategy, what Eli Lee would call "multiple messages to multiple audiences via multiple media."

If ACORN hadn't added the provisions that the Chamber of Commerce locked onto, then it wouldn't have been defeated. Instead, the activist groups involved overreached and gave the Chamber of Commerce what it needed to lock onto those multiple messages to defeat it. Even the opponents of the ordinance said that had this been two paragraphs about just increasing the minimum wage it would have passed.

So instead of hard feelings towards the Chamber of Commerce (who fought a hard campaign), why aren't we asking ACORN why in the heck wasn't the minimum wage ordinance just about increasing wages?