Tuke vs. Alexander
Sometime on Monday, I'll cast my vote in the 2008 election at an "early voting" polling place here in Knoxville. I've already made up my mind about the presidential race, but I'm still undecided between Bob Tuke and Lamar Alexander for the U.S. Senate.
Admittedly, this is really an academic exercise, since Lamar is going to win easily. (My vote for Obama is equally pointless, since he's going to lose by a landslide here. But I digress.) Still, I want to make an informed choice.
I don't know how many Tennessee readers I have these days, but if you're out there, I'm asking for your input: can anybody point me toward -- or, for that matter, would anyone care to make -- a good argument, one way or the other, about the Tuke-Alexander race? Or, if not an "argument" per se, any good information that might be lurking on the Interwebs? (No source is too obvious. I haven't done my homework on this yet. This weekend I will.)
My inclination, at present, is to vote for Alexander, resulting in my casting a "split ticket" ballot: Barack and Lamar. I am so inclined mostly as a symbolic vote against a filibuster-proof Senate, which I think would be a bad thing. (I say "symbolic" because, as I already noted, Alexander isn't one of the threatened GOP senators. If this is such a "wave election" that he loses, we could be talking about a 70-seat Dem majority. Heh.)
But I must admit, I haven't followed the race very closely, so I don't know much about either Alexander or Tuke. I remember Lamar's checkered lumberjack shirts from the 1996 presidential campaign, of course, but he's been largely off my personal radar since then. That said, I found the Tennessean's endorsement -- "this newspaper has not always endorsed [Alexander's] campaigns ... but we recognize Alexander's emergence in the past few years as a consensus-builder in a highly partisan U.S. Senate" -- pretty convincing. Conversely, I found the Democratic arguments against Alexander rather unconvincing when I heard both Tuke and one of his primary opponents, Bob Padgett, speak at the Truman Day Dinner back in May. It was pretty basic, boilerplate stuff: Alexander is a Republican, he votes with Bush a lot, he's "lost touch" with his home state, he's a "Washington, D.C." guy now, he doesn't care about "average Tennesseans," etc. etc. Basically just your standard-fare anti-incumbent, anti-GOP arguments. I couldn't help but think, "Is that all you got?"
But anyway... I'm definitely open to persuasion, so if anybody here, Tennessean or not, has strong feelings about either Alexander or Tuke, or has read anything interesting about 'em and would like to send along the link, consider this an open invitation to try and sway my vote. :)
[Posted on 10/23 at 1:23 PM; bumped to top. -ed.]
Admittedly, this is really an academic exercise, since Lamar is going to win easily. (My vote for Obama is equally pointless, since he's going to lose by a landslide here. But I digress.) Still, I want to make an informed choice.
I don't know how many Tennessee readers I have these days, but if you're out there, I'm asking for your input: can anybody point me toward -- or, for that matter, would anyone care to make -- a good argument, one way or the other, about the Tuke-Alexander race? Or, if not an "argument" per se, any good information that might be lurking on the Interwebs? (No source is too obvious. I haven't done my homework on this yet. This weekend I will.)
My inclination, at present, is to vote for Alexander, resulting in my casting a "split ticket" ballot: Barack and Lamar. I am so inclined mostly as a symbolic vote against a filibuster-proof Senate, which I think would be a bad thing. (I say "symbolic" because, as I already noted, Alexander isn't one of the threatened GOP senators. If this is such a "wave election" that he loses, we could be talking about a 70-seat Dem majority. Heh.)
But I must admit, I haven't followed the race very closely, so I don't know much about either Alexander or Tuke. I remember Lamar's checkered lumberjack shirts from the 1996 presidential campaign, of course, but he's been largely off my personal radar since then. That said, I found the Tennessean's endorsement -- "this newspaper has not always endorsed [Alexander's] campaigns ... but we recognize Alexander's emergence in the past few years as a consensus-builder in a highly partisan U.S. Senate" -- pretty convincing. Conversely, I found the Democratic arguments against Alexander rather unconvincing when I heard both Tuke and one of his primary opponents, Bob Padgett, speak at the Truman Day Dinner back in May. It was pretty basic, boilerplate stuff: Alexander is a Republican, he votes with Bush a lot, he's "lost touch" with his home state, he's a "Washington, D.C." guy now, he doesn't care about "average Tennesseans," etc. etc. Basically just your standard-fare anti-incumbent, anti-GOP arguments. I couldn't help but think, "Is that all you got?"
But anyway... I'm definitely open to persuasion, so if anybody here, Tennessean or not, has strong feelings about either Alexander or Tuke, or has read anything interesting about 'em and would like to send along the link, consider this an open invitation to try and sway my vote. :)
[Posted on 10/23 at 1:23 PM; bumped to top. -ed.]
posted by Brendan Loy at
10/24/2008 05:23:00 AM
