Some dispatches from the election night notebook:

Red county blues

Despite Democratic gains around the country, the folks with big Rs next to their names continued to flex their muscle on Tuesday in Oconee County and pretty much everywhere around Athens ("around" being the operative word).

Republicans’ hold on Oconee showed all election season, down to the very last contested local race, between land-planning firm partner Tom Breedlove and Rich Clark, a political scientist at UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Breedlove, without doing much on-the-ground campaigning to speak of, stomped Clark (who seemed to make the rounds more and did a lot of homework on school issues) by more than 6,000 votes, winning slightly more than 70 percent of the vote.

A lot to catch up on.

Since we can’t exhaust our main sheet with 80 inches of candidate forum coverage (it’s for the best, believe me), let me (briefly) recap here some of the other positions the 10 candidates took at this week’s Oconee Board of Commissioners forum.

Move the courthouse? Nope. Even Post 2 Commissioner Don Norris, who answered the question earlier this month by saying “it depends,” wouldn’t raise his hand Tuesday to say he wanted to move the county courthouse from Watkinsville.

Professional fire department? Nope. The county’s volunteer department ain’t broke, all the candidates said.

Two familiar faces from Oconee commissions of yore -- well, up until four years ago, so not really that yore -- announced this week they're saddling up as challengers in July's Republican primary.

One of them, current Bishop Mayor Johnny Pritchett, wants to take back the Post 1 seat he lost in 2004 to Jim Luke. Pritchett, the retired Athens-Clarke fire marshal, served eight years on the board. He's running on his experience in government and offered in his announcement to send a copy of his resume to anyone who wants it.

And, in a surprise move, longtime commissioner and chicken farmer William "Bubber" Wilkes called Thursday to say he's coming back for another run. Wilkes' 20-year turn on the board also ended in defeat in 2004 (to Post 4 Commissioner Chuck Horton), so on one hand, it's not too shocking he wants back in. But then again, after the '04 campaign, he said he was hanging it up.

Presidential candidates have been on the campaign trail for at least a year, but candidates for local elections are just beginning to awake from the stupor of real life and join their national counterparts for a few Kafkaesque months of mudslinging, misspeaking and political MacGuffin-ing (any issue these days, it often seems).

In the coming months, this blog will keep track of the 2008 election seasion in Oconee County, where nearly every county post is up. And, since Oconee stories in the Banner-Herald usually have a regional perspective, for good reason, the blog will also provide county residents a reliable source for smaller, local issues -- wrap-ups after commission and school board meetings, new trends, extra interviews, etc.