Nationwide, 2006 was a great year for Democrats and, in a very real sense, for small-d democrats as well. In state after state, voters went to the ballot box and voiced their disapproval of President Bush, Dick Cheney and a Republican Congress that had rubber-stamped his Neanderthal approach to governance. More than anything, Iraq swayed voters and hopefully the new Democratic majority will find the backbone and the wherewithal to expeditiously extricate us from a quagmire that has “Vietnam” written all over it.

In California, the sense of euphoria amongst Democrats and progressives, in general, was muted by the re-election of Governor Schwarzenegger, but that was to a great extent offset by the defeat of Representative Richard Pombo and the knowledge that Nancy Pelosi is poised to become Speaker of the House.

Oakland voters selected a new City Auditor, Courtney Ruby, with almost 66 percent of the votes cast and Measure O, which will provide for Instant Runoff Voting, won even more decisively with nearly 69 percent. With IRV in place, hopefully, we will never again witness the situation that arose in District 2 where Pat Kernighan and Aimee Allison faced off three times in the space of only nineteen months beginning with the April 2005 Special Election to fill the seat vacated by Danny Wan—followed by the June 2006 Primary. After a very hard-fought campaign, Kernighan finally won re-election by an 826-vote margin with just under 53% of the 13,060 votes cast.

If you’re new to the Guardian, you may not be aware of two articles I wrote criticizing the Allison campaign in the weeks leading up to the election. One was entitled “District 2 Lawn Sign Wars&” and the second discussed the extent to which outside influences were impacting the campaign.

While I stand behind almost all of the substance of those two articles, I do want to apologize for some of my comments about the Green Party. I wrote, in part:

Now, in second place on my list of outside influences is the Green Party. Ms. Allison is, perhaps, their only hope for a victory in this election and they are pulling out all the stops.… I really don’t understand why the Greens attract support. Their environmental platforms are overshadowed by their often-extremist positions.

It turns out that quite a few of the 5,000+ Oakland residents who are Green Party members are either personal friends or people who I know and respect. In retrospect, I regret my blanket condemnation of the Green Party, recognizing that their membership does include highly principled individuals. In addition, I failed to account for the fact that the folks supporting Allison were a mixed bag politically—as was the case with the Kernighan supporters. I also have to add that a Green candidate, Gayle McLaughlin, was elected Mayor of Richmond despite my contention that the District 2 race was their only hope for victory.

Although I was wrong on that score, I’m not backing away from another comment about the Greens later in the same article:

I have to admit I’m going to feel a bit sorry for the Greens. If they haven’t noticed, Allison is running away from her Green Party credentials.…

My prediction for the New Year: Aimee Allison will re-register as a Democrat and pursue another office—possibly Henry Chang’s At-Large Council seat, which is up for grabs in 2008. If so, the debut of her new website scheduled for next month under the AimeeAllison.org banner, will mark the opening salvo in that campaign.

My suspicions, which are shared by other political junkies, as reported by Will Harper, are fueled to a great extent by the phone poll conducted two days after the election by the highly respected team at David Binder Research. Although Binder has in the past done polling for the non-partisan California Voter Foundation, my guess is this poll was more likely commissioned by Oaklanders for New Leadership, the political action committee that generated the most controversial of the mailers supporting Allison in the last week of the campaign. If so, the results of the polling will help shape the basic tenor of any future campaign.

Speaking of predictions, I also wrote in my outside-influences article about Ignacio De La Fuente and the likelihood that he will or will not be re-elected as city council president:

De La Fuente is basically toast. He’s lost his best shot at higher office and is under an ethical cloud. The wolves on the council are already circling and he will not be re-elected.