This is extremely difficult for me to accept, but I have become a Democrat. I am going to vote Straight-Ticket Democratic on November 4! That's unbelievable to me. I cannot even believe that I am writing this down and admitting it. So, how on earth did it happen to me?
I am a white male, age 48, ex-military and (for years) I was a dyed-in-the-wool Independent. I was practically a poster boy for the white male independent voter demographic. Middle-class, christian upbringing but atheist now and my parents were raised in farming communities. I reserved the right to dislike any candidate based on the deficiencies and faults of that candidate as an individual. I would not be tied down to voting for any candidate because of some obligation to a political party.
(Cross-posted at The National Gadfly.)
Frankly, the idea of committing to a political party scared me. I believe that in part, I was afraid of looking bad or uneducated about things in the eyes of people that I knew. I could not tell you the first thing about sound economic, military or domestic policy. People around me that did talk, seemed to know what they were saying. At least, they were loud and sure of themselves. I was not at all sure. So, when I was asked about politics, I would rattle off some smart-ass comment about why they both stunk to avoid looking stupid.
I grew up in a divided home. My mother was a Democrat. She volunteered from her youth and even met JFK in Chicago when he was campaigning. My father was a Republican. He liked Goldwater and Nixon. I remember he and my mother arguing about politics whenever an election was imminent. My mother was politically active, attending events, fundraisers and the League of Women Voters. My father was politically opinionated, making stump speeches at holiday parties or at the bar with friends.
The political dynamic between the two of them, played out in my own views of politics over the years. I came to believe, as my mother did, that equality and justice for all people were as important or even more important than any other issue we face. I believed that no race or gender is better than another and that being silent about injustice is a form of participation in the injustice itself. Simply put, we are all people with none of us any better or worse than anyone else.
From my father, I adopted a detached, objective and analytical review of candidates and politics. My primary consideration for any election would be determined by my values at election time. With that in mind, I would then examine the candidates for the best match. However, my election choices have been so underwhelming that I could not hide my disgust for them all.
Over the years since my childhood, I grew to think of the Democratic and Republican parties in the following terms. The Democrats stood for all Americans, which I agreed with. However, their party had some serious negatives in my opinion. For one, they were often more destructive toward each other than any Republican. After primary elections, the losing candidates would often continue to weaken the winner's standing in the polls. When elected, they seemed to run hither and thither, either wishy-washy in their convictions or hampered by some scandal. To sum up my feelings about the Democratic Party: They were looking out for me, but they couldn't work together.
The Republicans were organized. Wow! Were they organized!?! Once the primaries were over, they'd line up behind the winner, circle the wagons and create the best organization they could. They showed up on time and in the proper uniform - every day. On the down-side, they were on the side of any company that wanted to make themselves rich and screw everyone else. Pollution, corruption, monopolies...you name it. All in all, I felt the GOP was looking out for the very rich and the rest of us were cannon fodder.
I first voted in 1980. My first opportunity to cast a ballot in a US election for President and I had a choice between Reagan and Carter. I was disgusted. The country was a mess back then. The only good news we'd had for 4 years was the Miracle at Lake Placid. Gas lines were around the block, jobs were disappearing, it was bleak. I just didn't trust President Carter. Ronald Reagan shows up waving the flag and pretending to be a simple country boy who just happens to love Big Business and the Defense industry. His answer: no rules, no taxes and let's wave the flag until we start a war. My first chance to elect a President and there was no JFK, Lincoln or Washington to choose from. I had reached the "lesser of two evils" bridge and stood in the middle of it. I did what any uninformed 20 year-old smart ass does - I penciled my own name in and joined the Green Berets. I voted for the same candidate in 1984 and 1988.
I got sober the next year. I'm not saying that there's a connection between my sobriety and my Presidential choices up to that point. I'm just pointing it out.
In 1992, I came down off the fence and voted for Bill Clinton. He struck me as 'slick' and when he talked, I did not believe him. (At least, not 100%.) At that point in my life, I had written off the Legislative and Executive branches of our government as ineffective, untrustworthy and one of the great disappointments of my adult life. Complex, conceited, childish, selfish and greedy is what those two branches were to me. I believed then that the Supreme Court was our only working branch of government. I chose Clinton, for the Justices that he would select.
President Clinton did not endear me to the Democratic Party. He was all that I got to see of them, after the GOP took Congress. The Gingrich / Limbaugh revolution came into Congress and the Clinton years were a morass of insinuation, accusation, intolerance and ineffectiveness. I did not care about Clinton's sex with Monica Lewinsky- but, I cared very much about his lying under oath about it. The President needs to be accountable to the rule of law and also to be an example of the rule of law. In lying, he became neither.
The law works for everyone or it works for no one.
In 2000, my life changed. In July, my daughter was born and in November, Cheney/Bush took the White House. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Al Gore. I thought he was insincere and spineless. I voted for Ralph Nader.
Since 2000, I have watched our country managed primarily as a funnel for taxpayer dollars (present and future) to pass billions of dollars into the coffers of oil and defense corporations. Our liberty and justice have been sold for scrap to oil barons and their hired guns - the GOP.
I never could bring myself to vote Republican. I guess that I just can't get over the firm belief that we are all in this together. I think that it is vanity, greed and malice for me to think that I can take from society without giving back equal or more. Someone told me that there is one secret to a successful marriage. Most people think marriage is 50/50. It’s not. It’s 60/40. You give 60. You take 40. That goes for both parties. I have come to believe that Democracy is like that, too. No matter how I hear it spun, the GOP message seems to be: "I got mine - tough luck for you."
Legend has it that, as he put down he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party. If he did say that, Johnson may have been prophetic in more ways than one. The Civil Rights Act gave the GOP the opening they needed for Nixon, Reagan plus the Bushes to run division and fear down our throats ever since. These last desperate days of the McCain campaign are perhaps (and hopefully) the death throes of that thinking.
Perhaps it took a generation for the Democratic Party to redefine itself in terms that can fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights Act, The Constitution and the American Dream. The Democratic Party and the American people needed to learn who they are and who we are, as individuals and as a group in the framework of equality. On the part of the Democrats, their identity had been defined in the struggle for equality. As Americans, we had been defined as separate but not equal. The Democrats and the American people had to figure out how to define ourselves in equality.
It's been almost 40 years and looking back I think that it is no wonder that the GOP and their focus on greed, fear division were so successful. They knew what they wanted! It was not equality, nor the common good. They were only looking out for themselves and they seized upon the opportunity provided by the simultaneous identity crises of the Democratic Party and the American People.
So, here I am and here we are. America, I think we know who we are now. We are a group of people, equal in the eyes of the law and it is this law that makes our country great. It is our honoring of each other - all of us together, that make ours a truly great nation.
We also have figured out whom we are not. We know that there is no upside to naked military ambition or unchecked corporate greed. We know that these things are not American values and they are not what makes this country great. Our country is not made great by waving a flag and torturing someone for 6 years in Guantanamo. Our country is not made great by stoking racism and hatred.
These are the reasons that I declare today, with pride and conviction that I am a Democrat. I stand with and for the people of the United States of America. I am ready to actively live into the American Dream that has finally made itself known to us all. I did not want to commit to the Democratic Party because I did not know who they were and I did not know what I wanted from them. It took us both a while to figure it out.
There is an old saying, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. We, the people...are the students and now that we're ready for the teacher; Barack Obama arrives to remind us that "we are the ones we've been waiting for".