On the way up to Oakland for the Green Party election night party, it was hard to miss the Giant victory celebration. Everywhere I saw orange people. Even the electric station signs were celebrating their (our?) World Series victory over Texas in five games. It was one of those rare occasions when the election was playing second fiddle to more important news.

     

It wasn't long after I got there that the speaker section of the meeting kicked off. Greg Jan was the master of ceremonies, introducing the speakers and tying the event together.

Don was one of the candidates for Mayor of Oakland. He said "If I'd have known that I could have this much fun and cause this much trouble by running for office before I would have done it years ago." The campaign had made him a much better speaker than he'd been at Laura's kick off event last winter.

     

Dave Heller explained that he had run for Congress against Barbara Lee to make public his opposition to her votes on some of the Iraq war issues. Two years ago he had run as a write in candidate, and this time he was proud to get many more votes as a ballot qualified candidate.

William Balderson talked about running for Insurance Commissioner as part of a long term strategy to bring change to the health care system. He wants to see a viable single payer health care system. He thanked all of us for our help with his campaign.

Peter Allen talked about the many interesting things that had happened during his campaign for Attorney General. He said that "probably the biggest hit of visibility came from the twelve seconds I spent on Michael Krasney's Forum Program."

  

Laura gave a nice speech. She thanked the many people that had helped her, including especially her husband Charles (shown sitting next to Peter Allen). She promised to continue working for progressive change in California.

After that we spent some time talking and analyzing the results and waiting for more information to resolve from the details. The vegetarian food was good and there was plenty of it. The bar served a fine selection of beers including a fine local one that I enjoyed. There wasn't much surprise at the outcome of the partisan races. We knew that Brown and Whitman were much closer to household words than any of the other names on the ballot.

There was good news on some of the propositions. For example, 23 (Texas Oil's baby) was going down.

The big non election news I heard was that Walmart is planning to build a lot of 5,000 square foot stores all over the place. They are taking aim at grocery stores like Mi Pueblo with that strategy. We are going to have to think about how to fight that.

The nearest thing I had to a horse in the race was prop. 19. I'd given out something like 600 buttons for it. Unfortunately that one lost.

The only winner who came by the event to thank us for our support was Robert Raburn, who got elected to the BART board.