Brad Zellar from the City Pages has an interesting report on the atmosphere at the DFL election night party last Tuesday. I especially like his speculation on the rhetoric of the concession speeches and "what might have been" if the 60's liberalism idealized by some (like the City Pages editorial staff) were to be adopted by the candidates:
"There were so many poignant and stirring episodes in the Democrats' election-night bacchanal at the St. Paul Radisson that one would be hard pressed to name a single highlight. For some it was surely the moment when a fiery Buck Humphrey took the stage and ignited the crowd with a torrent of oratory culminating in this exhortation from Mario Savio: "There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you cannot take part; you cannot even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!"
For others it was Roger Moe's elegant concession speech in the wee hours, in which the elder statesman concluded with this heart-stomper from Robert Browning: "I give the fight up; let there be an end,/a privacy, an obscure nook for me,/I want to be forgotten even by God." When he finished there was not a dry eye in the room. Okay, so I made all that up. The truth was more pedestrian, the atmosphere more melancholic and undignified."
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