Why Let Conservatives Destroy One of the Few Things Americans Still Feel Positive About?

The current poll numbers on how American feel about the federal government and how they feel about their local community show very stark differences. According to a recent ABCNews/Washington Post poll, Americans are pessimistic about the Republican-controlled Congress and White House, but optimistic about their local community:

Sixty-nine percent say the country is on the wrong track .... Pessimism about the policies Bush will pursue over the year ahead has jumped by 10 points since December, to 53 percent. Congress' approval rating is as bad as Bush's, and is the worst it's been since the mid-1990s.

Deep as it is at the national level, this unhappiness does not constitute a broad-based malaise .... It dissipates locally: While just 29 percent say the nation is going in the right direction, more, 45 percent, say their state is headed the right way, and 58 percent say their local community is on the right track.

Now comes local Republican Party boss, Jon Crisp to change all of that in Nashville. According to this morning's Nashville City Paper, Council member Michael Craddock's back-room orchestration of the Kay Brooks school board appointment is the first shot across Nashville's bow by the local Republican Party, which wants to do for to Metro what it's done for to the federal government.

Local Republicans are not happy with our general happiness with our local community, so they intend to pack the council and the school board with conservatives who will make you feel about Metro the way you feel about the current bunch in Washington. And you know what comes next: cuts to our residential services, larger holes in local law enforcement, deterioriation and decay of our infrastructure, and the acclerated decline of our public schools. They basically want to make us feel worse about our local community.

They probably intend to take advantage of low voter turn-outs for local elections and to use a network of conservative blogs and e-mail cells to turn out their vote. In other words, they probably intend to take advantage of your general satisfaction with your local community. I mean, dissatisfied people generally vote in larger numbers than folk who believe things are trending well. So, it behooves all of us, including the satisfied, to verify that our voter registration is up-to-date and then to get out on August 4 to vote. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of allegations about progressive conspiracies thrown around; Boss Crisp has already offered one: that Metro is run by "Vanderbilt-imported, liberal New England Democrats" (I believe that makes them "scalawag-recruited carpetbaggers" in the Reconstruction vernacular).