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Election Night, 2010, in Oakland, California

Story and Images From Rosalea Barker

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The California Nurses Association bus, which carried “Princess Carly” and “Queen Meg” to dog the two Republican candidates everywhere they went, parked opposite the Fox Theatre in Oakland.

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The recently restored Art Deco theatre is home to the Oakland School for the Arts, one of the charter schools Jerry Brown started when he was Mayor of Oakland.

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Scoop Media NZ being beyond the ken of Brown’s campaign staff, your not-so-intrepid columnist was ushered past the Honored Guest and General Admission signs to a side street, where she was ultimately refused entry to the Fox.

But I got some nice pix of the OSA students and those from the Oakland Military Institute—another of Brown’s charter schools—waiting until they were called on to do a turn when the old fella arrived to do his victory speech.

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and

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The side street was jammed with broadcast vans and their butterfly wings.

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Only a couple of blocks away, in an empty lot next to Oaksterdam University from whence the statewide proposition to legalize and tax recreational use of marijuana stemmed (if you’ll forgive the pun), a crowd gathered to watch the election results come in.

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Sadly, by 9:30, Prop 19 seemed to be losing.

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And elsewhere, so were the Democrats.

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Some desultory campaign workers sat in an Organizing for America storefront across the street from the Fox.

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And in a corner of the store, were the tools of the Get Out The Vote trade—leaflets and ironing boards, and a sign saying Vote for Mom.

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On the local scene, unless one candidate for Mayor of Oakland gets more than 50 percent of the vote tonight—which seems unlikely—the results of the Ranked Choice Voting tabulation won’t be available until Friday, November 5. That’s the same day on which former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle will be sentenced for his shooting of a young black man on the platform at Fruitvale BART station in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009.

I guess that must be why the Oakland Youth Radio building, across the intersection from where the Prop 19 event was being held, was having its windows boarded up. It is near where the mayhem occurred at the time of Mehserle’s conviction.

Then again…

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rosalea.barker@gmail.com
--PEACE—

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