YOU DON’T HAVE TO vote this November. Sure, the ballot offers a chance to choose among candidates for local offices, and it frequently happens that races hinge on one or two votes. But this year it seems like just the thought that you’ll vote has generated the seeds of change.

What else could explain the sudden about face of the county Board of Supervisors. Only a few months ago, the supervisors voted decisively to purchase the old Ockawamick School building in Claverack and then to move the headquarters of the county Department of Social Services to that site. Almost the only supervisors voting against the plan represent the City of Hudson, where the department is currently headquartered. Never mind the protesters and the outcry from city officials, this was a done deal.

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YUUUCH! Just mentioning the state Senate and all the inane squabbling going on there is enough to make any sane person want to take a long, hot shower with lots of soap.

   If it weren’t so serious it would sound like a script for a screwball comedy. The Democrats, who won a two-seat majority in the Senate last fall were barely able to agree who would lead them because a handful of Democrats from New York City threatened to defect to the GOP if they didn’t get the powerful posts they coveted. Their tantrums got them most of what they wanted, but then two of them defected anyway, and early this month those two Democrats helped Republicans stage what’s been called a “coup,” taking over the Senate with a one-vote majority and installing as president of that body none other than one of the dissident Democrats.

   No sooner had they done that than the other Democratic defector decided that, well, he really was a Democrat, and he went slithering back to his party—which was apparently glad to have him—leaving each side with an equal number of votes: a deadlock. Are you following this?

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SENATOR KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND dropped by Claverack last weekend to speak to a county Democratic Party fundraiser, and the policy issue she stressed most passionately was neither the economy nor Afghanistan, not even global warming or the whackos in North Korea. It was the issue that may well define this era: national healthcare.

President Obama has called for a vote by August on a bill that has yet to be drafted for a program that may cost more than $1 trillion over the next decade. From what she said Saturday evening, the senator from Greenport has a pretty good grasp of the problem, a reasonable approach to fixing it and a clear sense of what’s at stake if she and her colleagues fail.

Lots of people who have lost their health insurance or are barely able to pay for the worst overall healthcare system in the developed world support what’s usually called a single-payer healthcare system. Don’t like the single-payer name? Then call it Medicare. If it works for older Americans, why not make it available to everybody?

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