I'll start this off the way I started my "All The Way With LBJ Redux" post by saying that I'm 68-years-old and I'll be voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in seven months, but if I were much younger, I might not be. This time, rather than thinking about my memories of 1968 and 1972, I'm thinking about the election of 1980 and The Kennedy Problem. It's also a mea culpa about my own votes as a 24-year-old during the 1980 elections.
This year's Kennedy in the presidential race seems like he's so far out that his anti-vaccination and other conspiracy theories might draw more voters from the QAnon fringe that from the left-wing malcontents, but most of the money his campaign is getting is from the MAGA camp, so they are certainly betting that most of his voters will be taken from Biden. I live in a lefty/hippie environment and I'm already seeing RFK, Jr., bumper stickers and yard signs. Even more than sixty years after J.F.K.'s assassination, you never know what the magic of the Kennedy family name will do. One could argue that it also did incalculable damage in 1980, the last time that an incumbent Democratic President was defeated.
For those who weren't around in 1980, it's important to remember that the murders of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and 1968 didn't seem like history or the distant past. They still stung. Their surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, occupied J.F.K.'s Senate seat and carried more than a little bit of the family legacy with him wherever he went. He was also much more conventionally liberal on many issues than the middle-of-the-road Georgia Democrat in the White House, Jimmy Carter. I voted for Ted Kennedy in the New York primary on March 25, when it was still a race and Teddy was still leading Jimmy in many national polls. But, although Kennedy won more delegates in some big blue states like New York and California, by June 3, Carter had won 1,948 delegates to Kennedy's 1,215, and only 1,666 were needed to win the nomination. This is when, of course, most candidates would have conceded to reality. Two months later, Ted was still not conceding; in August he was calling for an open convention in which delegates would not be bound on the first ballot. It wasn't until everyone was at the convention at Madison Square Garden on August 11, when the delegates voted to uphold the voting rules, that he finally agreed to concede. Then, on August 12, he gave one of the great political speeches in American political history, "The Dream Shall Never Die" speech. It was about traditional liberal values. It was about him. It was a speech worthy of his late brothers. And it mentioned the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, once in the half hour he was on stage: "I congratulate President Carter on his victory here. I am confident that the Democratic party will reunite on the basis of Democratic principles, and that together we will march towards a Democratic victory in 1980." It wasn't even an unequivocal endorsement. I watched Ted's speech with awe and when the convention ended, I was not a Jimmy Carter supporter.
Enter John Anderson, a name that is fading from the collective memory [and from my memory too, so give me a few minutes while I do some research and try to figure out why the f*ck I voted for him in the general election]. He was more liberal than Carter on issues like abortion and guns and gas taxes while being more conservative on fiscal issues. He was a straight-talking independent Republican who had a lot of support on college campuses and from Hollywood liberals like Paul Newman (who had been a prominent Eugene McCarthy supporter in 1968 and had been at the March on Washington in 1963 and the first Earth Day in 1970).
But, looking back, I think the main reason that I didn't vote for Jimmy Carter was because of the remaining loyalty to Ted Kennedy and the fact that Ted didn't throw his full weight behind the Democratic nominee at the convention or on the campaign trail.
And we ended up with Ronald F*cking Reagan as our president for the next eight years.
I don't want any 24-year-old voters looking back when they're 68 to say, "Maybe we wouldn't have become the Russian Province of Trumpistan if I had voted for Joe Biden rather than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in 2024."
Now we enter a much darker era in American history...
1980
How to throw away a vote.
I couldn't find any buttons in my own collection from the year that ushered in Reaganism -- or from any of the elections in the Gordon Gekko decade -- so the buttons to the left were grabbed from Google images. (The soundtrack as I write about this year is the Clash's London Calling album.) For most of the 1980 election season I was working as a clerk at the Strand Book Store in the Village and living in Brooklyn, which -- when I see that sentence appearing in print across my screen -- I realize could describe an almost stereotypical media version of a #BernieOrBust voter in 2016. Having lived in California during the time when the right-wing host of Death Valley Days became Governor and started destroying the UC system and the rest of the state's progressive values, I already knew the dangers of Ronald Reagan. However, in the heart of New York's hipper precincts he was nothing but a joke. We would get celebrities shopping in the Strand all the time; one day before the conventions David Brinkley was checking out and the clerk behind the register asked the anchor of NBC News who he thought would win the election. "I'm afraid it's going to be Reagan," is how I remember his answer. If those weren't the exact words, there was definitely a tone of disappointment and resignation to a fact that most of us saw as outside the realm of possibility (again, reminding me of the conventional wisdom about Donald J. Trump in 2016). Reagan was a joke. We saw him as Goldwater, heading for inevitable defeat in the summer of 1980.
So I don't know how to explain my vote. Between the boring cardigan-wearing Jimmy Carter and the genuinely scary Ronald Reagan, we were also given the choice of John Anderson, who made appearances on SNL and must have had some sort of interesting political ideas that appealed to me, because I pulled the lever for him, just as many Bernie supporters will vote for Gary Johnson this fall. I can attempt to blame the fact that I was distracted. Between September and election day I had left the Strand, got married, started grad school at Columbia, had my best man murdered, quit grad school, and was job hunting on election day, but I should have voted for the merchant of malaise, lowered expectations and cardigans, over Ronnie and John.
It's funny how this writing process election-by-election is jogging my memory, because it wasn't until I got to the last line that I remembered exactly why I didn't vote for Carter, and it has a direct relationship with 2016. I had not voted for Jimmy Carter in the primary; I had voted, of course, for Ted Kennedy! And Ted did not go quietly at the convention in August. As a matter of fact, he gave one of the most memorable speeches in the history of late-twentieth-century American liberalism.
"The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Compared to the aura and eloquence of Ted Kennedy, is it any wonder that Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis failed to inspire even many in their own party in these elections of the 1980s? It still seems tragic to me that neither Bobby nor Ted ever moved into the White House. That being said, once Ted (or Bernie) was out, we should have given all our energy to electing Jimmy (or Hillary) over Reagan (or Trump), no matter how uninspiring we personally found the man from Plains (or the woman from Chicago).
1984
They were obviously trying to capture
some of that People's Party magic
with this design.
Here we are in the dark ages Orwell warned us about in 1948. (The soundtrack is Tom Waits' Heartattack and Vine.) We're also entering the darkest period in my political life. I have no buttons or stickers from this period at all. I voted for Mondale and Ferraro in 1984, but I did so with very little excitement. If the Democrats hadn't put a woman on the ticket, I might have just sat it out. I had moved out of Brooklyn and down to the Jersey Shore, largely because of crime; I was commuting to an office job in the city as a young married guy who was worried about his first mortgage; I was prime recruitment material for the GOP and people were turning into Republicans all around me. Anyone who has ever seen any zombie movie can imagine the atmosphere. When were they going to get me?
I don't remember Ronald Reagan's reelection ever being seriously in doubt and I'm convinced that Donald Trump's visceral hatred of "low energy" candidates must come from memories of Fritz Mondale and the next Democrat who followed him to the slaughter in 1988.
1988
... or not. I really can't remember.
"Maybe it is just the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man." (The soundtrack as I write this is not Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock' but Keith Jarrett's Dark Intervals.) Maybe it was the fact that I was approaching my mid-thirties, commuting to a conventional job, and living the expected conventional life, or maybe it was the every-man-for-himself Wall Street Zeitgeist, but for whatever reason this was the most conservative period of my life. I'm trying not to avoid a very dark fact here, but once again I really can't remember if I actually flipped a lever for W's daddy when it came right down to it.
The Democratic front runners were in rough shape after Gary Hart fell to a sex scandal and people still remembered Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" statements from 1984. The convention was a mess, with Ann Richards' "Silver Foot In His Mouth" speech being the only shining moment; it's also remembered for the worst and longest keynote speech delivered by a young Bill Clinton.
Dukakis did nothing for me on a gut level. I didn't mind his silly ride in the tank, but I hated the way he purposely fled from the word "Liberal" until a lukewarm acceptance of the label in the last days of the campaign. I wasn't a fan of his wonkiness and the fact that he proudly stated at one point that he never read fiction (which I was writing at the time). I know it's shallow, but there are a lot of people rejecting Hillary Clinton this year for shallow reasons, or voting for Trump for even shallower reasons. 1984 never struck me as a choice between the lesser of two evils; it seemed more like the lesser of two nonentities.
I'm going to end Part Two here, giving the decade of greed its own section, but I have to finish on a positive note. Any flirtations that I might have had in the 1980s with the Dark Side of American politics came to an end with the birth of my son in late 1989 and the beginning of the first George Bush's first Iraq War in early 1990. Those events snapped me back to my liberal peacenik senses for good.
The Fairness Doctrine may no longer be law, and the Republican Party has made a point of opposing it, but, simply to be fair to the other fifteen Republican Presidential candidates who are not on CNN 24 hours a day, Donald J. Trump should not be allowed to speak at tonight's CNN Debate at Saint Ronald Reagan of Tampico's Holy Library (and decommissioned Air Force One hangar). I don't think I'm overstating it too much to say that CNN has become The Donald Trump Network in the past couple of months. I have not flipped over to that section of the dial in weeks without either seeing a live Trump speech, analysis of his latest inflammatory remark, or phone interview with the man himself.
So, I flip to #CNN for a second and look who's doing his Il Duce impression during yet another live speech... pic.twitter.com/rQ9bBI8OAC
It was all well and good to joke about GOP debates as clown circuses in 2008, 2012, and earlier in 2016, but now that the chief clown is driving the Republican bus, it seems a little more serious, and dangerous, than that. And with the Fairness Doctrine dead in spirit as well as law, the candidate standing in the middle of the stage tonight will continue to be the center of attention. I expect more questions about the horse race, and what the other candidates think about Donald Trump, than about today's good Obamacare news, or about the death penalty on a day when Oklahoma may be executing an innocent man.
Issues?
If CNN wanted to talk about issues, they'd be showing Bernie Sanders' speeches.
The participants in the 2016 GOP Clown Circus are being officially invited to set up their travelling circus tents and adorable little clown-car rodeos in the parking lot of Simi Valley, California's Ronald Reagan Library [sic, don't expect to see any books there] on that date.
On this Thanksgiving weekend I was thinking about an uncle who's been gone for a while. He was the first person who gave me my archetype of how a conservative person's mind works. Over a Thanksgiving dinner table, his biggest complaint (before he had kids) was: "Why am I paying school taxes? I don't have any kids!"
Remembering that statement reminded me of a tweet I made a month or two ago. I think I remembered it word for word and just tweeted it again: "The biggest fear of liberals is that someone might starve.The biggest fear of conservatives is that someone might get something for nothing." It was a spur of the moment statement, and it still feels very true to me. When the first draft of a tweet turns out to be exactly 140 characters long, it also seems to me to have a special quality of 'truthiness.'
But we see the conservative's dislike of paying for other people's needs in more than Uncle X's hatred of paying for the education of other people's children. We see it in the predictable GOP opposition to paying for any health or welfare program, or extension of unemployment benefits, or infrastructure, or investments in mass transit, or green energy, or even giving disaster aid without taking that money out of some other social program.
But there is more than just greed at work. There is resentment of anyone who gets a government "handout" or "free lunch". The resentment is summed up in Ronald Reagan's fictional 1976 caricature of the "welfare queen" that made him a hero among the conservative uncles of this nation:
"She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."
Of course their resentment of "getting something for nothing" does not extend to resentment of those who get a free ride by being born a Trump or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy or a Bush. That's the only way that money for nothing is acceptable in their world view, and they are doing everything they can to make the passing of wealth between generations easier and tax-free.
But why don't they feel the same resentment about the money that gets poured down the rathole of military waste? Why the cheering of wars and the death penalty and military tribunals and police brutality and almost any other form of state violence? I think they see this violence protecting their property rights, but it's still the part of American conservatism I have the hardest time understanding.
Republicans have had no trouble breaking the other ten commandments in recent years, so it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that they have decided to ignore the eleventh too. "The Eleventh Commandment" was created to silence liberal Republican (yes, Virginia, there once was such an animal) criticism of Ronald Reagan in his run for Governor of California to avoid a repeat of the liberal Republican criticism of Barry Goldwater that had exposed him as a dangerous joke in the 1964 presidential election. The liberals, of course, shut their mouths and a grade-B moviestar and host of "Borax Death Valley Days" began his improbable rise to the chief executive offices in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
Patti & Ronald Reagan Only Two Years Before Moving from Boraxo Commercials to the Governor's Mansion.
Luckily for us though, the conservatives in the Republican Party in 2010 do not seem as anxious to shut their mouths for the sake of party unity (unless the party unifies behind their own very particular brand of wingnuttiness). Here are a few promising signs of the coming GOP fratricide just in the last two days:
politicalwire.com: "Republicans Furious at Steele" in which Republican House and Senate aides are described as furious at their own party chairman Michael Steele.
Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine: "The First Senator from the Tea Party" in which ultraconservative wunderkind Marco Rubio's challenge to the merely conservative Charlie Crist is described in great detail.
So, are there any Republicans still observing the Eleventh Commandment? Of course there are. You don't hear Republican moderates in Maine or elsewhere in the Northeast speaking ill of their fellow GOPpers, do you?
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
