Staying at home

Well, the Super Tuesday primary election results reinforced why it is that we keep the focus local here at the Sun. We wondered in last week’s editorial if John Edwards might poll well and become a spoiler at the Democratic nominating convention. By keeping either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama from having enough votes to win the nomination on the first ballot, Edwards could have used his endorsement to swing the outcome, perhaps even putting himself on the party’s ticket as Vice-President. But he pulled out of the race, and now it looks to be a close, two-way battle through the rest of the primaries.
And we’d discounted Mike Huckabee, calling the Republican contest a two-man race between John McCain and Mitt Romney. But Romney apparently stopped buying TV spots, and Huckabee’s grass roots campaign almost reprised the role played by the last Arkansas governor to run, that being the front-runner’s husband, of course, Bill Clinton. It looks now like the Republican nomination will be McCain’s.
What are they learning?
Reported in today’s issue is a poll taken among students at Sonoma Valley High School. Over half of the students voted in a mock election on the slate of candidates running for President. One of the most interesting results is the fact that the top three vote-getters were all Democrats, accounting for almost 80 percent of the votes cast. Yet the country itself has a Republican President, and the last two presidential elections were agonizingly close to 50-50 between the parties, nationwide.
So if the students are out of step with the national distribution, perhaps that’s simply a reflection of local leanings in politics. Not so. State-wide, Democrats outnumber Republicans 43 to 33 percent, and in the City of Sonoma, the numbers are 52 percent Democrat and 26 percent Republican. Maybe it’s the idealism of youth that is attracted to the promises more often heard among Democrats that government can and should solve society’s problems. Or is there some other explanation for the disproportionately heavy Democrat representation?
By the way, it’s always fun for some high school seniors to vote in their first actual elections, thanks to Richard Nixon’s hope for a greater margin of victory in his 1972 re-election. But somebody will have to explain to us why these young adults can be trusted to vote responsibly at age 18 yet not to drink responsibly until age 21.
Thanks for listening
Readers will recall that our recommendations on the statewide propostitions were “no” across the board, and we’re glad to see that’s how the local voters felt, overwhelmingly so. As it turns out, there were many more voters in other counties favoring the expansion of Southern California gambling casinos, as reported in today’s issue, and those measures did pass.