Fellow Orange County resident Kevin Drum recently observed that even in his semi-conservative hometown of Irvine (where I work), there are more Kerry-Edwards supporters than Bush-Cheney supporters willing to denigrate their own cars by pasting tacky stickers on their bumpers. For some reason that escapes me, Drum appears to be proud of this. [Emphasis in original.] [Of course it was in the original. This was the original, you pinhead! -Ed. Oh yeah. Not-Ed.]

Drum finds a 11:7 ratio, which strikes me as about right, if not a little low. Mrs. X has one apolitical bumper sticker on her car, depicting a human hand patting a dog on the head. My car has no bumper stickers at all. In fact, the only time I drove a car with a political bumper sticker all year, it was a Kerry/Edwards sticker on a car owned by a friend I’d traded cars with for the weekend. Don’t worry, I went out of my way to drive rudely and cut/flip/piss people off every chance I got. Every day, walking from the parking lot, I see one bumper sticker on one beat up, crappy car that would probably be banned if California’s strict emissions standards were applied more consistently. That sticker calls not for Kerry’s win but for Bush’s defeat, alleging “wars, lies, and corporate ties.” As if to suggest that ties to money-making entities (such as the manufacturer of said crappy car or said bumper sticker) were a bad thing. I saw more cars like that when I lived in West L.A., and more still in the Bay Area. But I have yet to see a single car plastered with fifteen stickers announcing four times that the driver is voting for Bush, plus another sticker announcing his opposition to the Kyoto treaty, the world court, or just about any other conservative cause except gun rights or opposition to abortion. And I don’t even see many of those.

I do have to take issue with Drum’s characterization of Orange County generally, or Irvine specifically. Some parts of Orange County - Santa Ana, for instance - lean overwhelmingly Democrat. Irvine doesn’t, of course, but I think this a gross exaggeration:

[Y]ou still can’t get elected dogcatcher if you advertise yourself as merely a “Republican.” If you’re not a “conservative Republican,” you’re out of luck. My neighbors don’t like to take chances, you see.

That will come as news to Governor Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican who enjoyed massive support in the region, despite having an image as a moderate-to-liberal RINO, and despite the presence of a Real Republican alternative in the same race. It will be an even bigger surprise to Irvine Dogcatcher Mayor Larry Agran, a liberal Democrat who has won too many elections to count over the years, despite having forgotten to even pretend he was a Republican of any stripe. And then there’s good ol’ Bob Cintron, the liberal Democrat County Treasurer who famously bankrupted this otherwise conservative county in the early 1990s, after running against a conservative Republican who made a campaign issue of the very investments that ended up sinking us. While Orange County Democrats may not enjoy the electoral entitlement their Northern Californian^* brethren and sisteren take for granted, they’re not exactly shut out of the decision-making process, either. We’ll see how Democrat activist Sukhee^* Kang (whose first name, unfortunately, is not pronounced “sucky”) fares on Nov. 2.

^*Yes, as a matter of fact, I do consider Los Angeles County to be part of Northern California. I haven’t decided what to do with northern Orange County. Tustin, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach can stay, I suppose, but as a rule of thumb, if your area code is 714, you’re living in L.A. South, not in the O.C.

^**Despite our political differences, if I lived in Irvine, I’d probably vote for Sucky myself. The name is just too cool to pass up. Once the election was over, I’d spend the next two years looking high and low for a potential opponent named Phuoc Yu.