Somebody Hand Harry A Crying Towel

Awww, poor Bucks County Repug party chairman Harry Fawkes is lamenting the narrow victory of Charley Martin over Steve Santarsiero in the Bucks County Commissioners election last Tuesday, ensuring a 2-to-1 Republican majority with Martin’s play mate Jim Cawley and Democrat Diane Marseglia (less than 1,500 votes separated Martin and Steve, with no small amount of assistance provided by third-party candidate Jay Russell, who received nearly 6,000 votes).

Bucks County’s Repug poobah offered his reflections to J.D. Mullane in a column that appeared in the Courier Times yesterday, with Mullane offering what I thought was a strangely passive response to Fawkes that showed a slight amount of ridicule (seems that our local pundit king is trying to play both sides of the fence, seeing the way that the prevailing wind is blowing at long last, though he did manage to sneak in that cut that Bucks would become “New Jersey West” if the Dems took over county government).

Fawkes, as you may expect, criticized those baaad former Philadelphians who have moved to Bucks and polluted his precious Repug stronghold with their odious “Democrat” tendencies, as well as the rise of registered independent voters (60,000 according to Mullane’s column).

Gee, those numbers tell me pretty clearly that Bucks is slowly souring on the Republican Party (some background on the national level appears here; I think some of what Balz and Cohen tells us filtered down to last Tuesday’s election somewhat, but primarily, the race was run on local issues, and the turnout reflected that, unfortunately – it actually tells you something that so few voters showed up but the results were as close as they were).

Indeed, that sentiment was reflected as follows, in this post prior to the vote…

“I don’t get the sense, walking up and down the streets of Bucks County, that people are counting down the hours to Nov. 6,” said Andy Warren, who was a Republican commissioner in the 1990s and is now a Democrat. “I don’t get the sense that there’s any driving issue – nothing seems to have caught on.”

I wanted to mention Andy Warren here because I have a question for him – what the hell kind of Democrat are you anyway?

Aside from some commendable work to ensure that our votes are registered and tabulated fairly, I haven’t seen you do a thing for a Democratic candidate for office besides yourself. You did zilch for Patrick Murphy, and as nearly as I can determine (and I watch this stuff carefully, I have to admit), you did the same thing for Steve Santarsiero and Diane Marseglia.

Maybe if you'd bothered to find out, you would have known what some of the "driving issues" were in the Bucks County Commisssioners campaign, some of which I discussed here.

With a track record like that, you should contact Fawkes yourself. I’m sure he’d welcome you “back to the fold” with open arms.