My earliest “political” memory is being the lone supporter of President Ford in my 3rd Grade class and being asked by all of my classmates why I didn’t support Jimmy Carter (I had no good answer other than my father supported Ford.) Honestly, I think I just feared change.
I’ve lived in South East Texas (the Houston area) nearly my entire life and always considered myself a Republican. In High School, we joked about how (Houston’s Republican mayor) Louie Welch said we should “shoot the queers”. In college (in the late 80’s), I once unthinkingly told a joke about black people that included The N-word in front of a black friend (the mere memory of doing so still makes me cringe.) I apologized (poorly) when I realized what I had done, but that friend never spoke to me again.
I started to become disillusioned with the Republican Party during the George HW Bush Administration and the 1991/92 recession. The first time in my life I was ever politically active was in getting H. Ross Perot on the ballot in Texas by collecting signatures. I was a huge Perot supporter… the self-made billionaire talking horse sense about how the two Parties had failed us (hiring both Carter’s & Reagan’s campaign managers to run his campaign.) And while Perot (unlike Trump) didn’t vilify Mexicans, he was the only one (of the three candidates) opposed to NAFTA and the “giant sucking sound” we would hear as U.S. corporations fled South for the cheap labor. Both Bush & Clinton supported NAFTA and (so-called) “Free Trade” (and I think time proved Perot right.)
Perot warned that while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, the leading industry there was “chicken farming” and if we elected him, “we’d all become chicken farmers”. The Bush campaign coined the term “Slick Willy” to describe Governor Clinton’s evasiveness about his past. Both warned Clinton’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy would make the current existing Recession FAR worse and crater the economy.
Then Bill Clinton got elected. And wonder of wonders, Republican fearmongering over raising taxes didn’t lead to the disaster my years of indoctrination had led me to believe. The economy not only recovered, but took off like gang-busters. Republicans went on a 6-year “witch hunt” where an investigation into a failed land deal kept morphing into anything Republicans could think of to try and stop him (so I kinda get how many Trumpsters feel, but trust me, the two are NOT the same.) For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Republicans investigated “Socks The Cat’s Fan Club” & “The White House Christmas Card list” because some senators believed the WH was using government money to pay for the stamps (compare that to Trump’s scandals, from Emoluments to naked profiteering off his office… all before getting to the disaster that is his foreign policy and obscene abuses of power where he literally believes himself to be above the law. But I digress.)
Soon after taking office in 1993, Clinton proposed a “National Health Insurance System” during his first State of the Union Address (even holding up a mock National Insurance Card that he said would “store all of your medical information”… which horrified privacy-obsessed paranoid Republicans), putting his wife Hillary in charge of the project. That was probably the beginning of the GOP’s seething hatred for Hillary. By 2000, I was was a full-on Democrat working to get Al Gore elected. And in 2003/2004, I backed Howard Dean who made health care reform the cornerstone of his campaign.
As we all know, George W Bush was “awarded” the presidency in 2000 and was a monumental disaster (FAR worse than even Trump.) Two Recessions… the second so catastrophic it led to a global economic meltdown. He ignored warnings of an imminent (and arguably preventable) terrorist attack until it was too late (“’binLaden’ was Clinton’s over-hyped ‘Wag the Dog’ bogyman”), and then to overcompensate for that massive failure, invented a threat by an unrelated country (Iraq) that demanded America’s first ever “First Strike” attack on what turned out to be a paper-tiger, tossing the entire middle East into turmoil and wars we continue to fight nearly two decades later. In addition, he turned Clinton’s Balanced Budget & $200 Billion dollar surplus into a $1.2Trillion dollar deficit, and (shortly after reelection) didn’t adequately prepare New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina (appointing a friend and former head of the Arabian Horse Association to run FEMA) that lead to thousands of poor (mostly black) people without rescue for days until he saw the crisis on TV. Between Iraq, 9/11 and Katrina, I estimate over 12,000 Americans died as a direct result of Bush’s incompetence. Trump may be a power-mad, racist, toxic-narcissistic crook, and if given a second term, might be able to give “Dubya” a run for his money as “Worst president ever”, but he still has a ways to go. (My DailyKOS tagline has long been: “Bill Clinton made me a Democrat, but George W Bush made me a Liberal.”)
In 2007, I quickly backed Hillary for president because of her work on health care reform during her husband’s administration. But the fight between her and Senator Obama got ugly quickly. It was fairly clear to everyone that the two candidates did not like each other and openly attacked one another. Someone on the Clinton campaign “accidentally” released a photo of Senator Obama during a recent trip to Kenya (where he had lived for a few years as a boy) being dressed in a turban & native garb for a ceremony, which gave “birth” to the “Birther” movement that Donald Trump latched onto and used to rally racists in an idiotic attempt to get Obama kicked out of office on the grounds he was not a natural born citizen.
Hillary stayed in the race far longer than most felt she should after falling way behind in the delegate count, ignoring calls to “drop out of the race for the good of the Party and throw her support behind front-runner Obama (Sanders’ supporters should be picking up on the hypocrisy by now.) When asked why she was still in the race so late in the game, Hillary actually cited the assassination of RFK in June of 1968, then had to apologize profusely for making it sound like she was waiting to see if someone might assassinate Senator Obama before the election. But for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Hillary actually told reporters that “John McCain (the Republican nominee) had more experience than Barack Obama”. I could instantly picture the McCain ad featuring Hillary making the comment and costing us the election. This was someone more interested in winning than the good of the Party. I angrily switched my support to Obama and never looked back. As calls for Clinton to drop out grew, many (mostly female, all belligerent) Hillary supporters started calling themselves “PUMA’s”, which stood for “Party Unity, My Ass”, vowing not to support Obama come the General election.
Obama of course went on to win, and even named Hillary his Secretary of State (not VP). And just like the Bill Clinton presidency, the economy boomed and every Republican dire warning of what heath care reform (“Death Panels”) and raising taxes on the wealthy would do to the economy, Obama rescued the country (the planet?) from economic catastrophe, spurred the longest uninterrupted stretch of job growth in American history, and cut the Deficit by 2/3rds.
Obama’s success drove Republicans, Conservatives, and Racists nuts. But I think we ALL underestimated their seething hatred of the man leading so many to rally around a racist narcissistic TV clown like Donald Trump.
Here we are four years later. Trump… a dictator wannabee who adores Strong Men who don’t have to answer to anyone... is a foreign policy nightmare. He left our Kurdish allies to be slaughtered, alienated every ally (who make jokes about him behind his back) and is made a fool of by our enemies. North Korea has gone from maybe 12 nuclear weapons to at least 30 today... and possibly even an ICBM... while Trump makes concession after concession, receiving nothing in return. Putin has him wrapped around his little finger as Trump works overtime to get sanctions lifted on Russia and absolve them of the election meddling that helped him win the presidency… a humiliating thought a Toxic Narcissist like Trump just can not accept. And I haven’t even gotten to the Baby Cages, child kidnapping and border concentration camps.
The one thing keeping Trump’s reelection prospects alive is his economy. If not for that, he would almost certainly lose in November. Trump… the consummate self-promoter… wastes no opportunity to brag about his economy. “Record low unemployment and continued job growth” while falsely claiming (to supporters with the memory of goldfish) that he inherited “a mess.”
But Trump’s “amazing economy” is a fraud, floating on a sea of red-ink thanks to his massive unfunded tax cuts. (It’s not unlike taking out a second mortgage on your home and then living large on the extra income.) Unemployment continues to fall as the Obama Recovery continues its record stretch of job growth… but that growth has been slower under Trump’s first three years than it was under Obama’s last three. Ditto for Trump’s “amazing” stock market (which is no real indicator of middle class economic growth) which has grown much slower than it did under Obama. For 2018, the DOW actually ended the year lower than it started… a feat not seen since George W Bush in 2008.
While I’m still a Health care voter, I think Climate Change (and the technological/job/economic boom that would come with it) is now my #1 issue. During the 2016 debates, Hillary Clinton agreed with Donald Trump that “terrorism” was “the #1 threat facing America”. Sanders was ridiculed for saying instead that it was “Climate Change”, pointing out that while terrorists may kill at most thousands, Global Warming could potentially kill “billions”.
So much of Sanders’ 2016 platform… once considered extreme… has been adopted by nearly all of the 2020 Democratic field. Medicare4All, raising the Minimum Wage to a livable wage, a “Green New Deal” (which I know by name came later but was the baby of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez… a political novice Sanders endorsed & campaigned for), and free/affordable college.
Many terrified Democrats fear-monger that the country “just won’t elect a person who proudly calls themselves a [Democratic] Socialist.” But Trump will (and already is) calling ALL Democrats “Socialists”, doing what he does best: terrifying voters into supporting him. Might as well nominate someone who says, “You’re damn right!” and then defend the label, not someone who ends up sounding defensive as they spend weeks (futilely?) proving they are not. I remember just a few years ago, people were saying the country would never elect a black man president of the United States… ESPECIALLY one with a middle name of “Hussein” and a last name that rhymes with “Osama” so soon after Iraq & 9/11. But they did.
I will of course “Vote Blue No Matter Who”. They myth of the young white uncompromising “Bernie Bro” is just that, a myth. Sanders & Warren share nearly the same voter demographic. I’ve spoken to several of my old Republican friends here in Texas, and the fact Obama warns against Sanders, and Hillary despises him (continuing to talk trash about him despite the fact he campaigned for her) has great appeal. MANY of my Republican friends, turned off by Trump’s antics and behavior “that undermines the dignity of the office” he holds, would consider voting for Sanders, and only Biden & Sanders currently poll within striking distance of winning Texas… both of whom have dramatically different platforms. You don’t have to choose between the policies you want and “electability.”
(Footnote, despite my praise & support of Sanders, I have yet to officially endorse him. I am not looking to convince you to support any particular candidate, only alleviate unjustified fears regarding his electability.)
