Trans/plant/portation

wasserman political cartoon

Intrepid readers of this blog will recall that before Election Day I made some crack about CNN showing some crude holograms as part of it’s “Watch Us!” election coverage. I said it in jest and with a jaundiced eye, and then lo and behold, there is Wolf Blitzer having a rather inane conversation with a “virtual” reporter — about the technology and not the election. Whether said “holograms” were real or not, I was prescient. So with such completely uninspiring obviousness, here are a few other “predictions:”

1. Obamania will be fading fast by the end of the first 100 days. The message about hope is great, the enthusiasm is fantastic, and you can’t live in DC for more than a decade and not feel like the obvious differences between Obama and the outgoing administration hit you like a truck pileup on the Beltway. But to enact his ideas he simply has to govern from the center, which is going to strike some — vehicle carnage aside — as inauthentic at some point. It isn’t necessarily the case, but there will be some folks who see this as a selling out — and it’s just a matter of time when people feel like Obama’s pulled a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or a welfare reform bill that we weren’t expecting.

2. The Daily Show will be no more — Jon Stewart for one isn’t going to want to continue walking the tightrope of making fun of the people in power in a politically “incorrect” way without getting TOO incorrect about it, for one. But without the 8-foot wide pipe of shit that was the Bush White House giving Comedy Central such excellent material, we’re going to need a new kind of political humor. Jon is going to jump ship to more mainstream broadcast comedy — probably after Jay Leno’s next gig fails right out of the gate. Long live Conan.

3. Reversals to the tightening of reproductive rights laws is either going to happen quietly and successfully, or is going to be the once and future “gay marriage” of the religious right. I’ve seen it only on the margins of reporting so far that Obama will reverse the global gag rule — that to get federal funding for family planning practitioners have to first and foremost talk about abstinence-only practices — and given that this is something they’re planning in the first week in office, signals that there is some Hillary agenda being taken up within the administration. So if they’re serious about rescinding that executive order, will they go the next step and try to get some more permanent legislation passed? If that’s the case, how will they work that on the Hill? With fanfare or under cover of night?

4. Michelle Obama is only going to First Lady us for so long before the Real Michelle stands up — and by that I mean that you cannot possibly contain this smart lady within the narrow confines of the duties and office of First Lady for long. While I think the President (I’m only jumping the title gun by a couple of hours here) is anxious not to repeat any Clintonian mistakes, like putting her in charge of health care, I do think she’ll get some kind of policy duty. She’s not going to be content with picking out furniture, talking about the girls’ school choice, and continuing Laura’s quite boring legacy of the National Book Expo on the Mall.

5. The $850B stimulus bill is not going to pass in the way we think it will today. Already there are rumblings about how it’s not going to help anyone in the near future. If that logic catches wind in the Capitol, who’s going to vote for it? Obama will likely get a lot more traction on job creation than in having to constantly spin the stimulus as something other than a “typical” Democrat tax and spend program. But again, I’m as jaded as a cheap Obama statue currently being sold in a small mobile vehicle parked 100 years from the Washington Monument….

So concerned was I that my pie wouldn’t be allowed under the rules of the Daily Market’s second annual pie contest that I emailed the contest organizers with my question. My email was forwarded to the grand poobah of the pies, apparently, as follows:

Hi Robynne,
Do sweet potatoes qualify as a fruit?
Lina

P.S. We had a cat named Sweet Potato Pie when I was a kid because my 
sister and I couldn't decide what to call it and the neighbors suggested 
Sweet Potato Pie. But I've never tried the pie and I'd love to!

I seem to have hit a sweet spot with my choice of pie, pun intended. I mean, she’d love to try it? It reminds her of her childhood cat? Who’da thunk it?

But I didn’t want to get too excited. Perhaps I’d have to switch up to an apple pie after all. I’d have to wait for a response from Robynne. On a side note, are there like, 39 ways to spell Robin or what? There are almost more than for Catherine.

Fortunately for me, Robynne responded quickly. 

I think sweet potato pie is fine. basically we wanted to stay away from
cream pies. I love sweet potato pie and it's Obama's favorite so it's
timely!

Now with this response, I wasn’t as sure what to think. I mean, clearly she loves that Obama was elected? Should his favorite pie mean that it will be her favorite pie? Now that I think of it, through this whole long entire primary and general campaign season, I think the one tidbit I hadn’t discerned in all of the interviews, debate watching, articles, talking heads, and conversation with friends, was Obama’s favorite pie. Where on earth did she learn this little factoid?

Susanne, for her part, is fact-checking the pie preference of our President-elect. Googling Obama’s favorite pie, she found that his favorite is in fact:

PECAN PIE. This because he asked an aide for it to go for his usual dinner of salmon, broccoli, and brown rice. According to his daughters, he’s not a big fan of the sweet, but instead prefers pumpkin pie. Either way, pecan pie sounds just awful after a salmon dinner. To me, anyway.

So where has this idea that sweet potato pie is his favorite? I will ask the Robynne character when I see her.

UPDATE: Susanne found the reference. In a stump speech on October 18 in St. Louis, Obama said his favorite pie is sweet potato pie. His second favorite is pecan pie. You heard it here . . . not first, probably.

For better or worse, Susanne is teaching a class this semester on the elections. This sounded like a great idea, I’m sure, before we as a country traveled through the last 18 months of the primary and then general election. I was asking Susanne if she’d brought any of the Democratic Party voting materials I’ve gotten in the mail to her class, and she rightly informed me that she couldn’t do so before November 4, unless she had some things from the GOP side of the fence. So I offered to drop by our local Republican headquarters and gather some “collateral” for her. I think she thought I was joking. The woman ought to know me by now, right?

WW County Republicans Logo

Twenty minutes later, I saunter in. All is quiet. Unlike the Walla Walla Democratic HQ there are no piles of yard signs, crowds of people buying “Hope” t-shirts and jerseys (seriously, I saw a veritable crowd two weeks ago), or lots of happy chatter. There was one older lady walking my way. She was wearing a t-shirt, all right, which I presume was not for sale (feel free to make a joke here about how many Republicans would sell you the shirt off their backs), and which read:

Just Another

Gun-Toting

Religion-Clinging

Bitter

AMERICAN

What a lovely message it was. I wanted to ask why the shirt didn’t work in the apathy portion of Obama’s quote about people in Pennsylvania, but I figured it was because it doesn’t make for a nice image, like toting guns or clinging to one’s religion. Instead of inquiring into her fashion’s political message, I just said hello. She gave me a big grin and asked how she could help me.

I realized only then that I’d walked into the enemy camp. What the hell was I thinking? I better come up with something believable, I mean seriously, the woman totes guns.

“You’re not uh, toting a gun now, are you,” I ask with a smile.

She laughed (good sign?) and said no, but she did have license to conceal, as did several members of her family. So great, she could be lying and is just ready to shoot me dead the minute she realizes who she’s talking to. Okay, she’s probably not going to shoot me dead and she probably doesn’t have an actual gun on her. So I say I’m looking for some McCain/Palin brochures and the like.

And then I was shocked by her response.

“Well really, we don’t have any anymore.” Wow. I think of the stacks of yard signs, bumper stickers, tri-fold brochures, and holograms of live-action Obamas giving speeches on the stump, like Princess Leia in Star Wars, only in full color and not with quite the same sense of life-and-death urgency. Fine, they don’t have any holograms over there at the Dems HQ. But by the 2012 election, they will. It’ll be the next big thing in gubernatorial races — like asking for money online was when Howard Dean stuck his virtual hand out to the nation.

She went on to explain that volunteers had been taking all of the collateral out on them in their canvassing. But really, McCain pulled his campaign out of Washington a long time ago when it was evident he wasn’t going to pick up our 11 electoral votes. At any rate, the table was pretty bare. There were a few things that the locals had cobbled together so that the single picture of John and Sarah, looking happy and victorious, wasn’t so lonesome at the back of the plastic folding table. I looked down and saw a strip of paper with some typing on it. It read something like:

The problem with Obama’s candidacy is that it’s socialist. He has been supported by the New Left, which wants to make the US a socialist state. Their first goal is universal health care. That’s just another term for socialized medicine. It hasn’t worked for Russia, the UK, France, or Canada, so why would it work for us?

I was mesmerized. The leaps in logic. The blatant untruths. The fear mongering that what, we’ll go straight to the dogs if we have an alternative to our private system that currently leaves 46 million Americans uninsured? I wasn’t going to argue the point, but I wished I could have taken the strip of paper out the door with me.

The woman and I chatted about the initiatives on the ballot, which include funding for transportation infrastructure changes in Seattle, a right to die law similar to Oregon’s, and increased training for long-term care providers. She asked another woman who she said was a staffer of Dino Rossi’s (the fellow running against the Democratic incumbent for governor), to come on out and talk with me. It was an interesting conversation, and we could have been discussing bowling on ESPN for how good-natured we all were. I certainly wouldn’t suggest Republicans are bad people. But I do wonder what it takes for people in the same country to have such a distinctively different opinion of the world than I do. And I’d been hoping that it wasn’t about building a foundation of lies and misstatements, like universal health care = socialism. But hey, maybe it is. Maybe they think all of us Democrats are blind, or liars, too. Maybe we’re actually closer than we think we are, but hot button issues like reproductive rights, gay rights, the role of government, are just so divisive we can’t make time for the things we do agree on. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, the only fights I remember seeing were on the softball field or in the hockey stadium. Life got more complicated somewhere along the way, sometime, I guess, when I first started stepping out of the mushy mainstream part of society, when I first started saying I was going to be my own person even if it meant a little gayness here, a little sex change there. But I love my country, flaws and all. So I suppose it’s no big deal to walk into GOP-land. I could just flash my Washington State University Visa card and then duck out while everyone is reflexively shouting, “Cougars!”

voting sticker

Except that in Washington State, I didn’t even get a sticker. And I realized a few things with this no-precinct voting process:

1. It’s the one time of year I like to stand in line. I mean sure, I don’t want to stand in line for hours, but a few minutes whilst I make my way to the front of the M-S line or whatever it is that year, nodding knowingly to my voting neighbors, performing our collective civic duty — that’s absolutely fine. Only to be let down dramatically in a few hours, but I wouldn’t be a Democrat if I wasn’t pessimistic, right? I suppose in Eastern Washington I would more likely be in line with Republicans, but perhaps not this exact neighborhood, next to the college. But I really enjoy seeing who lines up to vote — young parents with their children in strollers, couples dressed for work who made voting part of that day’s commute, older folks who look so excited for their candidate. I realize this is colored by years of voting in the DC metro area, but I saw these people in upstate New York, too. And I suppose they’ll line up a week from Tuesday. I’ll just have already voted with my paper ballot.

2. Early voting kind of sucks. So I voted earlier this week when I got back into town. I went back and forth on some of the statewide initiatives, especially the right to die initiative. But I filled in all my ovals circa my 1987 SAT exam, put it in a bright pink security envelope (which makes me think they know nothing about security — “yoo hoo, security over here, people! nice bright pink security!!”), and then in the mailing envelope, and then I took a trip to the post office since I had to sort of “see it off” personally. If people are stealing Obama lawn signs out here — and they are — I’m not leaving my vote sitting in my mailbox. But here’s what really nags at me for voting 10 days ahead: it’s over. Of course the campaign continues, poll numbers shift and evolve at every second, it seems, but I’ve done my business now and there’s nothing else I can do. Voting on election day lets me have my say at the proper end of the process — I’ve heard everything, seen everything, political news junkie that I am, and I’m responding, and my response will be counted in the precinct results and talked about by the likes of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and all the others. But voting by mail is odd that way. I either get to wait to the last minute like before, or I get to have my vote counted ON election day, just not both. Washington’s Governor race was settled by about 130 votes last time, and those two personalities are battling it out again this year. So I want my vote in there by the time November 4 arrives. I put myself on the sidelines, understanding of course that I wasn’t going to change my opinion before the big day, anyway.

3. That mailing envelope I referred to earlier? No bulk postage on it, so I had to affix a stamp. Okay, I actually got a lot of pleasure out of writing “affix” just there, but back to the main point, I was kind of shocked I had to pay for my own postage. Isn’t that a kind of poll tax? I found out that I could have walked it directly to the election office, but I didn’t know that from any of the voting print materials, so I feel a little misled here. Surely the State of Washington can pony up another $120,000 so that everyone can send in their ballots without putting a stamp on the envelope. I mean, if Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes can do it, our government can. They’re even going to make someone a millionaire in the process! Sheesh.

This year’s election has set a record for early voting, for people newly registered, for online fundraising, and a whole host of other trends. I just wonder: if I feel like I’ve lost something with this no in-person process, I wonder if others are feeling it too, and I wonder how people younger than me, for whom this is their first or second election, will know if they’re even missing anything at all.

Edited to add: But don’t take my word for all of this, even the Washington Post agrees with me.

Random assessment of things I’ve noticed since leaving W2 and visiting the DC Metro area:

1. It takes a hellishly long time to get out of the eastern half of Washington State, as if a stubborn forcefield is slowing us down, some kind of invisible quicksand we’ve found ourselves in. No, maybe it’s more like when you were a kid at the beach and you stood in the surf and sunk a quarter inch further into the sand with each crested wave. And then thinking that walking out of it when you were buried up to mid-calf would still be easy, but surprisingly wasn’t. It’s kind of like that.

Cute and fresh pumpkin

2. Being away for 8 weeks and coming back isn’t really like returning after 8 years, but enough has changed to make me feel like I’ve lost track of the goings on here. New construction, new coffeeshop (Peregrine has replaced the thieving Murky Coffee on 7th SE), new headlines about people I don’t remember.

3. I’m getting good at rushing through the introductions so I can find out how everyone REALLY is.

4. Space is so much tighter here than in the west, but for this Easterner, tight space = comforting, and loose space = lonesome. I am trying to rewire my brain, but it’s challenging (see #1 for description of challenging).

5. I really miss my friends. I am trying not to see Walla Walla as a space in which I lack friends, income, the joys of a good job, the feeling of being successful and attached to the larger world, but without any friends, income, or job, this is difficult. Lea said to me yesterday that the universe gently suggests to us to take a break when we need one, and when we ignore the gentle suggestions, it pretty much forces us to take that break. I don’t disagree with her. I’m going to do my best to insert a structure into my day, but to give my knee the rehabilitation that it needs, get into my writing whether I’m any good at it or not, be there for Susanne as she adjusts to her new work environment, and see where all of that takes me. Being back in DC for a time has been good so far at helping me see how much stress I’ve lived with while I’ve lived here the past 11 years, and to see that W2 might really be a way to get some decompression from all of that.

6. Getting such decompression requires that I adjust my values from where they’ve been — focus more on family and relationships, and less on the tropes of DC success, which haven’t actually made me happy.

7. I love trees. Driving under canopies, driving through stocky rolling hills knowing I’m never more than 20 miles from a river, lake, or ocean. Hearing crickets at night. I want to find some terrain near where we now live that I can identify with. And I want to find new sounds that are native to W2, or that will make me feel like I’ve come home after a trip away.

8. I love watching Susanne get really into a conversation with someone. She sometimes holds back in the beginning, listening and making her judgments, and then several minutes in she starts the back and forth volley of ideas. I wonder if that’s how she plays tennis.

Eastern Market building

9. People outside DC really don’t understand the comraderie between people who work together to make things happen here. How “mavericks” don’t necessarily make things better, and how “outsiders” need to spend so much time getting to know people here — becoming insiders, essentially — that they don’t actually change the fundamental way the system works. I wish we’d all stop pretending that people who know how to make law and enact policy are bad people be definition. They’re people who are good at their jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with effectively governing a nation.

10. I really wish I’d have gotten to be here for the next inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe I’ll watch it like a football game that you mute so you don’t have to hear the insipid reporting on the play by play.

DC building on a sunny day

So Susanne, for better or worse, has moved into a veritable community of faculty and staff, and of course, students. As I mentioned in the last post, we’ve gone to one staffer’s house for dinner, and we’ve also been over to another faculty member’s house for a chocolate tasting event which was, shall we say, very Walla Walla. To clarify–in DC, such an event would include a chocolate waterfall, set up next to a Melting Pot-like tray of pineapple, marshmallows, strawberries, cheesecake, and the like; a table of Brazilian and Peruvian or fill in your exotic country of choice dark chocolates, some European chocolate for comparison, and 6 people from the Commerce Department who would espouse on the history of chocolate, whether they actually knew anything about it or not. Out here, well, it was a bunch of folks sitting around a dining room table which barely had enough room for us and all of our host’s houseplants, eating little taster-sized chocolates that she got from a friend. Way more down to earth and simplified. And, I suppose, much less pretentious.

Walla Walla petunias

The ready-made crowd is nice, but I feel the need to meet some people on my own, as if meeting everyone through Susanne would doom me to a life apart from any decision-making I could do. Which I know isn’t true. But it appeared to me to be healthier to find avenues of my own toward friendship and comraderie. So I ventured down to the local, lonely Democratic headquarters for the county.

Boy, were they happy to see me! So happy! Happy happy joy joy! I thought I might get a Busby Berkeley musical number upon my entrance. Now just for kicks I may have to visit the GOP HQ to see what that experience is like. It also helps that it’s next door to the only Chinese lunch buffet in town. (And the all-you-can-eat buffet, by the way, is $6.49 — eat that, Baltimore former coworkers! So if you want to meet up next Friday, let me know.)

At first, they didn’t know what to do with me. I have hours and hours of free time right now. Should he canvass for us or do some phone bank work? Or be at the phones here? Immediately clear to me was that each person does in fact make a difference. As someone said to me last weekend, one person is the difference between a phone ringing endlessly at the HQ because nobody’s there to answer it, or a person to pick it up and respond.

I didn’t think the canvassing would work too well given the state of my knee rehabilitation, so I have opted for the phone bank. Oh boy. Can’t wait until I get my massively long list of numbers to call, so people can curse at me and hang up on me. But I’m sure I’ll make some new friends there — and they’ll be Democrats. Which means, I’m not sure.

Last Saturday Susanne and I went to a fundraiser event for the local HIV non-profit education and healthcare provider, Blue Mountain Heart to Heart. The idea is that over the course of a specific week, Walla2 residents host dinners at their homes and people come over to donate and eat, and then at the end of the week, the organization hosts another party with desserts to announce how much money was raised, and thank everyone for their work and donations. It’s along the lines of what Food & Friends does in DC to raise money, although for that effort folks go out to participating restaurants who donate a portion of the proceeds of their take for that night. So here I guess Heart to Heart gets more percentage of the donation, since the dinner hosts don’t hold anything back, but the number overall is a lot smaller. At any rate, we met a lot of nice people, and now I have a date for the first debate on September 26 — at Becky and Bob’s house. (I am not making this up.) Which brings me to another question — who the hell schedules a debate on a Friday? Do they think we’re going to watch on a tavern TV with the NBA pre-season games playing on the next screen over? That’ll be the day.

Anyway, the DC Democratic HQ and the bleeding-heart liberals’ fundraising event aside, how else to meet people in Walla Walla? Well, I have a couple more route here. One was supposed to be bowling. I mean, seriously, I love bowlers. They want activity but not too much activity. They want teammates but not too much competition. They typically enjoy beer and other light refreshment. They’re definitely on the dorky side, and generally not very pretentious. My kind of people! I think I have to wait until January, though, because Mr. Knee here had to get overexcited at the Billie Jean song at his wedding, and he’s still not ready to fling the strikes down the lane. So that means…

I hope to meet people at the orthopedic’s office tomorrow! Hurt people here I come!

It’s funny what comes to mind when one says they used to live in Washington, DC, to someone who has never lived there. They tell me, almost like a reflex, that it’s the murder capitol of the country. I think the PR folks for Mayor Fenty need to get off their asses and come up with something, anything, else to replace this perception. Possible new mottos could be:

DC: 50,000 Lawyers Couldn’t Be Wrong — except, I guess, most folks don’t know that there are 50,000 lawyers working in the city. So maybe that one is out.

City of Monuments

Come for the Cherry Blossoms, Stay for the Slowly Flooding Metro

Okay, okay, so maybe “murder capitol” rolls off the tongue better than any of those. But hey, there was that recent Supreme Court decision to overturn the city’s ban on handguns, so perhaps a new campaign could focus on the pro-gun tourist. 

“Show the Murder Capitol Who’s Who!”

Or maybe not.

So I’ve started trying to figure out how to respond to these accusations that DC would have eventually killed me, either by terrorist attack, nuclear bomb, random violence, shock of the cost of living, or terrible traffic. And while many of those things could happen, that’s like chastising someone who lives in Florida as waiting around to die in a hurricane. Instead I think most initial responses are something like, “wow, do you miss the sun?”

Florida people, correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve tried to tell people that the violence isn’t that bad, all told, that it’s pretty, has a lot of free museums and other cultural attractions, etc. And then they lean in, lower their voice so as to avoid Big Brother’s invisible gaze, and say, “and there are a lot of POLITICAL people out there.”

This is where I gasp and looked shocked.

“Political people, are you sure?” I’ve sometimes put my hand over my heart in an ironic pledge position, but really to suggest that my pulse may quit at any second. And then they of course realize I’m kidding.

This conversation, had about half a dozen times since moving, has been interesting and mildly amusing. But I didn’t expect to have it while trying to buy two new cell phones from my carrier this morning. I even got to see a permit to carry a concealed weapon (which frankly, I could have made myself with some plastic laminating sheets and my old Royal typewriter that I used to bang out bad short stories when I was a kid.

“Bet you won’t see this in DC, mister.”

He had me there. His point was that there would be many fewer violent attacks there if you weren’t sure if your intended victim was packing or not. I did not care to debate this with him, wanting only the nice shiny LG phones that would make it easier to text, and bring Susanne finally into the 21st century. Or even 1995, for that matter, since the woman has eschewed mobile devices until now. I just told him that I took care to stay in safe neighborhoods and not do anything stupid. Like pull a gun out of my pants to thwart some would-be mugger, only to have him wrest it from me and shoot me in the face. Because that would be my life if I had a gun. Or rather, the end of my life.

Nice to know, though, that certain people are carrying out here. They’re indebted to this Wild West thing. All I really want is a job.

Let’s just say the two sides are pretty close. It’s bigger than it lets on, but it’s pretty small nonetheless. I’ve taken barely any photos since I’ve been trying to get the house in order, which is coming along, finally. We may have turned a corner. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Seattle for a few days and I’ll get to spend quality time with an old friend, so I’m really looking forward to that!

Backstage Bistro in Walla2

I’m here at Verve, a “coffee and art house,” which is currently hosting about 5 moms and their kids for a mid-morning get-together. It’s not exactly the hip quiet I was looking for in which to write, but it’s nice that nobody here is frowning on them, either. That’s something to like about this place. I’ve started a list, I suppose, since I just adore lists. So far, on it are the following:

Walla Walla Wheatbrew, a local heffeweisen that is pretty enjoyable with lemon or orange.

The desserts at the Colville St. Patisserie, which nearly makes all of last week’s awfulness bearable.

The slower pace, as referred to earlier, though I’m still on my DC gear so I haven’t noticed it much yet.

Speaking of gears, there is also this:

Outside a transmission shop, Walla Walla

I’m at a loss for words, I think. But I see a new LJ icon in my future.

It’s a bit rainy today, which is fine because it keeps things cooler around here. It’s not just an abstraction of desert, it was 111F earlier last week. Thank goodness we missed that day. We’re about halfway unpacked, I’d say. Once the pictures all go up we can cover up a bunch of the wall dings, so it’ll look a lot better. It just doesn’t seem like good business practice to me to never inspect one’s investment properties and just wait for shit to break. What’s a $1,000 roof repair today will be a $20,000 roof replacement later, right? But hey, I don’t run the place. I don’t even work here!

So Walla Walla, also called Wallyworld, which I find funny because of Vacation, is kind of cute, kind of hot, kind of small, kind of interesting. I have to hit the pavement for real and get a job. That perhaps deserves its own blog. Kidding.

Stone Soup in Walla Walla

So Walla Walla is from one of the native American tribes around here, meaning “water water.” It’s right upon the Columbia river and is a big part of the burgeoning wine industry in Washington State. It’s pretty isolated, about 40 miles from the first thing you could call a “big” town, and about two hours south of Spokane. There’s a westerner-easterner of Washington rift here that I’d never thought about but that is reminiscent of the North VA vs rest of the state infighting that folks in the DC area know all too well.

Politics is a little different out here. The WA governer, Chirs Gregoire, came out here last week to give a stump speech on the campaign trail, since she’s up for re-election. About 100 people showed up at this very coffeehouse to hear her speak, and they clapped and had occasional standing ovations. It all ended with chants of “four more years!” Interesting to see their fervor, after I’d gone to Clinton’s concession speech, which looked more like this:

Clinton concession speech

I’m not saying one is better or worse than the other, just that there are some different expectations about what government means, how it runs, what politicians can really offer their constituents, and whether political change comes from within or outside the system. I feel very tentative about engaging in any political discussion in a way I didn’t hesitate back in DC, because I knew the grounds for conversation. I have to suss them out here. It’s one more adjustment to make, I suppose.

Okay, on to the researching part of my day. I’ll have lots more photos of Washington soon.