Gerrymandering at its best
Question: When was the last time you looked at a map of Maryland’s 4th Congressional District? After some recent posts where I lamented the downfall of bipartisanship that cost Al Wynn his seat (not that I was a huge fan of his), I realized that I didn’t know what the district boundaries looked like. All I knew was that I liked Chris Van Hollen in my old district.
This was a surprise. I knew the district extended down into Prince George’s County, but I had no idea it had been gerrymandered so badly. That’s an awful lot of ground to cover when you could really use more federal funds for crime prevention and gang control.
Anyway, that’s my election day fodder for all you taking the time to read. Now get out there and vote. And don’t forget – Democrats vote today, Republicans vote tomorrow.
Here’s to cautious optimism…
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This district is total BS because it pretty much ensures that Silver Spring will always be represented by a PG county resident. We had Al Wynn for years and he was absolutely terrible. He was such a sore loser, he quit after he lost the primary, leaving us with no representative at all! Meanwhile, Chris Van Hollen from district 8 is a rising star and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
I abstained from voting for a congressional candidate at the poll today. I nearly voted for the Republican out of protest but couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.
And it’s interesting to contrast the 8th District boundary lines which run northwest through the more wealthy parts of Montgomery County.
As I recall, this district border was geared mostly toward wresting the District 8 seat from Connie Morella.
I know that it’s gerrymandered FOR the party to which I belong, but I still don’t like it.
Somewhat related: When I was living in Bethesda awhile back, Maria Shriver was handing out leaflets at the Metro for her brother, who was running against Van Hollen. I so wanted to do my Ahnold impression but had to resist.
It was bad enough that Al Wynn lived in Largo, but look at Edwards and James. Donna Edwards lives all the way down in National Harbor, where you know she’ll see more of Virginia than she ever does of most of our district. And Peter James (the Republican) is crazy. He also lives in Germantown, which is at least in MoCo, but still thirty miles away from here.
I don’t care if the candidate lives in Prince George’s if he/she were more centrally located, though I figure the geographic center of District 4 is probably somewhere in D.C.
Maybe in her next campaign, Donna Edwards will exclaim “I can see Virginia from my front porch!!”
I should have left that space unchecked on my own ballot. Can we get a real candidate in 2010?
I live on Sligo Ave and the difference between living in 8 (my district) and 4 literally amounts to the side of the street I live on. Seriously.
Only in Maryland.
A big difference between Wynn and Edwards is he is/was a BIG Prince Georges County politician (“Prince Georges County king maker”), she has not held office in Prince Georges County which I think means she is not beholding to anyone. I also understand that although she lives in Fort Washington now, she has lived in Silver Spring (not sure about it though).
Montgomery County is 38 percent of the district so should have more clout. The main district office is in Largo and the second office is in Gaithersburg but manned only once a week (so the Largo office told me). We should expect the Montgomery County office to be further south in the county, not at the far reaches of the district, and fully staffed.
I was told Edwards was at the Silver Spring Library voting site early this morning.
I think I will run in 2010 on a “Montgomery First” platform. Who’s with me?
I’ll help run the campaign if I can be Chief of
BeerStaff.May have to look into this. Maybe I can run as a really moderate Republican. Might be easier than challenging the incumbent in the Dem primary.
Democrats vote today, Republicans vote tomorrow…but Libertarians get free chocolate. AND slots.
Sligo, try to not be ridiculous.
I ran in the 2006 State race as a Republican in District 19, which is about the same territory as in the MoCo Council District 4. That is to say, “East Montgomery south of Olney west to Rock Creek, plus Redland”. I also ran as a moderate centrist Republican in the 2008 special election to fill the seat vacated by the untimely death of Marilyn Praisner.
In the District 19 race, I was the Republican with the middle amount of votes, not the most nor least. Still, all victorious Democrats beat the highest Republican’s number of votes by about 2.8 to 1.
The only reason I did as well as I did in the race for Delegate was because there were three candidates for three seats. In the Councilmanic District 4 special elections I came in dead last, as one of four Republicans vying for the single slot.
The Republicans around here have become far different from the Republicans who consistently made sure that Connie Morella was the candidate that survived the Republican primary so that even Democrats could vote for her in the General Election. Let’s just say that in the present day — unless they’ve learned something from their unrelenting series of stinging defeats here over the last 12 years of election cycles — the Republican Party of Montgomery County won’t get past the primary anyone who isn’t a Theocracy Extremist. Centrism is seen as capitulation or as collaboration, a concept as anathematic to MoCo Republicans as it is central to the Democrats.
My point? Run as a Democrat, as an Independent, or even as a Third Party candidate if you want to have the slightest hope of ever making it past the primary.
To reiterate, the local Republicans would never let another Connie Morella get past the primaries; they only want to throw up candidates for whom no Democrat could vote.
I’m somewhat ashamed to be in District 8, which after the gerrymandering has put District 4 literally across the street from me. I’m one of the people who voted out Connie Morella and it’s darn sad, because I supported every last one of her positions, except for the one she shared with all candidates, being totally weak on enforcement against illegal aliens. And see where that’s got us, okay?
Maybe you could take a look at http://www.radicalcenter.org and see if that’s something you could work for, Maryland and the nation need a Third Party that is both looking towards tomorrow through the lens of analytical Futurism and is also Conservative on all things that matter, but which distances itself from “Backwardsism” and refuses all of the “trending towards Theocracy” which is splitting the Republicans so badly that people like me have dropped out of that party and are ready to register as Democrat just so that the majority of the district can have a chance to vote for a sensible conservative Centrist.
Yes, Sligo. Ixnay on the idiculousray.
Wow– Peter James is so nutty, he really ought to be running for mayor of DC. He could give Faith a run for her money.
“He said he has also persuaded several Germantown businesses to accept “Just Money Notes,” a local currency he has created that is backed by small slivers of gold. Issued in units called “terrapins,” the notes feature images such as the Maryland seal, and a lion and lamb lying together. (He acknowledged the bills are not in widespread circulation, meaning merchants’ pledges to accept them have not been tested.)”
This article Dan Reed posted begs a few questions:
1. Which Germantown businesses agreed to accept his gussied-up Monopoly money?
2. Why is this guy a Republican, and not a Libertarian?
3. Does the Republican Party know he’s calling himself a Republican?
Maybe back in May or so, I ran into Peter James at a meeting out in Burtonsville. We were trying to get the ill-fated District-4 PAC up and running and some of the candidates showed up. This was the first I had even heard of him.
He spent a considerable amount of time explaining the “money as debt” concept. His solutions — locally issued specie or even Barter Scrip — might have worked very well in the time between the American Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention, and in fact did work fairly well, though enough problems arose in interstate trade that the decision was made to have a central bank and one national currency.
Yet the set of problems inherent in “money as debt” have come to the forefront of the global economy over the month of October, when “money as debt” has come to be an immense problem for places like Iceland or Hungary, otherwise solid production economies except for the fact that their currency was backed by debt-loads measured in multiples of those countries’ GDP.
Mr James, however, is in the position of someone who accurately recognizes that he is being attacked by a leopard, and thinks that the appropriate response is to sing nursery songs at it. That might have worked if the leopard wasn’t tone deaf and also already devouring his larynx leaving him nothing with which to sing.
More appropriate, I believe, would have been trading in actual gold standard on a local basis. All he did with his “terrapins” was to try to reignite the greenbacks/gold-standard debate in one neighborhood, with him in the position of the central banks whose existence he decried, only on a very very tiny scale.
Mr James, as I understand it, was running as a Republican because the Libertarian candidacy was already locked up, but inexplicably no party had yet been found to run as a Republican in uber-Democrat Fourth Congressional District.
Well, off to point out that the MoCo “commercial paper” dependence is about to fall flat on its face as investors realize that MoCo can’t possibly afford to have both a Triple-A bond rating and neighborhoods in decay such as Piney Brunch and Aspen Hell.
I too got caught in the gerrymandering to get rid of Connie Morella – now I vote a mile away in Takoma Park instead of a block or so away with many of my neighbors.
I’m bitter about it still. I’m a proud way-lefty Liberal (with a cap L) and I knew Connie Morella, she is a wonderful person and did great things for our district. How she was treated was cruel and unfair.
Sure, in the abstract, we needed to get a “D” in and replace one more “R” in Congress – but these are people not just numbers or symbols of their party.
Has it been worth it? What has Van Hollen done for downtown SS? Will he do anything for us in his 2nd term?