I made a point of arriving early at my Washington, D.C., polling precinct this morning, at 7:45, expecting parking problems and lines around the block. Parking wasn't hard and there was only a bit of commotion. But as I got closer it became clear that the commotion wasn't Obamamania--it was mainly moms and dads dropping their kids off at the elementary school across the street. Lesson: don't believe the rapturous crowds you see on TV are everywhere. Inside, the place was barren. The number of voters I counted (12) barely outnumbered the precinct workers. The whole thing seemed oddly anticlimactic. (But as a DC voter I'm accustomed to that.) I'd assumed that yuppie Northwest DC would be a hotbed of furious liberal civic-mindedness, but some reporting (actually, walking down the hall to talk to this guy revealed that Ward 3, where I live, is one of only two white-majority precincts, and therefore considered Hillary territory, insofar as such a thing exists in DC. That'd explain the robo-calls. Not sure what it bodes, if anything, for the candidates..
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/dispatch-from-the-district-of-columbia/51979/
