SO I'M NOT the only fool: 60 percent of the respondents to the last Bay Guardian online poll thought John Kerry would win the election. Another 18 percent thought the lawyers would be fighting it out for weeks – and only 6.4 percent thought George W. Bush would win.

Yeah, there's a lot of wishful thinking out here on the far West Coast, but even in the mainstream news media I could sense that almost everyone was expecting Bush to be in trouble.

But in the end, there were more evangelical Christians and people who voted against their own economic interest than people who saw through Bush's lies. And now, as Tali Woodward points out on page 13, Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (hiss) are trying to blame it on Mayor Gavin Newsom and same-sex marriage.

Which may be factually wrong (there's an article making that point on Slate.com), but that's beside the point. Newsom's marriage move was one of the very few very cool things any Democrat in this country did this year. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 cost the Democrats votes in the South; should Lyndon Johnson have vetoed it instead? Was that law (in Feinstein's words) "too much, too fast, too soon"?

Dianne, you make me sick.

The good news last week was that San Francisco demonstrated that district elections work and that ranked-choice voting works, and for all the problems (it's amazing that even this city couldn't pass a business tax), progressive politics are very much alive here at home. And that's even more important now, with a truly ugly four years ahead of us.

Now, more than ever, cities like San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland are going to be on their own, with little help and plenty of repression coming down from Washington, D.C. Somehow, in four years, the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out how to find a candidate who can beat back the right-wing assault on the nation, but in the meantime, the resistance has to start in local communities.

San Francisco activists and officials have to look for more dramatic things like Newsom's same-sex marriage program, more symbolic (but still important) things like Sup. Chris Daly's antiwar ballot measure, more ways to defy the USA PATRIOT Act and tax the rich and pay for public health ... because nobody else is going to do it for us.

Tim Redmond