Routing Tinker

By Kleinheider Posted on August 8, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Chris Davis describes the scene from the “victory” party of defeated congressional candidate Nikki Tinker:

It’s tempting do describe the mood at Ground Zero as grim from the git-go. But it wasn’t grim. It was much worse than that. The mood was nonexistent. For most of the evening there was no candidate in the house and not very many supporters waiting on her arrival. The blues band on stage played to a largely indifferent mix of confused tourists who’d stopped in for ribs and to sign Freeman’s get-well banners and bored reporters with nothing to report.

The club was minimally decorated with a few banks of balloons. A sparsely laid snack table went untouched until 9:40 p.m., when speculators began to wonder if Tinker was going to be a no-show. Because she hadn’t merely lost an election, she’d run a campaign based almost solely on race and religion (with surrogates adding homophobia to the list), and she had been definitively crushed by an opponent she’d attempted to bizarrely tar as both a Jewish anti-Christian and KKK-friendly.

Throughout the evening, a small cluster of well-wishers like Judge D’Army Bailey (sipping chocolate martinis and talking about his book deal) and Pinnacle Airlines CEO Phil Trenary (describing himself as a “big Democrat”) would cluster around a television on the Club’s northeast wall to tut-tut over the returns.

“It’s a rout,” one man of Armenian descent grumbled into his cell phone. “The race isn’t even competitive.”

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