Your first time...

Nov. 4, 1980. The day after we buried my father.

A woman who hadn't seen us in a long time was in line ahead of me, my mom and one of my sisters, and she had no idea cancer had claimed my dad (and very quickly too).

"So, how's Mr. Dangerously?" she said, cheerfully.

Two things stand out about that election. First, I recall that my mother used to vote for whomever my father was voting for. I know how terrible that sounds, and I'm sure there was some discussion about it, but mostly my memory tells me once he decided who was getting his vote, you could add his plus another to the tally.

So I wondered what was going through my mother's mind while she was standing in line at Oak Park Elementary School. I never asked.

The other thing, which I've told nobody until now, is:

I was decidedly pro-Carter for the entire campaign, but one night, over steaks and potatoes after fall baseball practice, an older woman who'd caught my fancy made an impassioned argument for Reagan. I wouldn't know until months later how fervently Republican she and her family had always been, and the fire in her eyes made an impression. She gave me a lot to think about for my first election. I was 19 years and one month old. I didn't know a damn thing, and I had a really bad case of being 19. It would get worse.

Those who know me would never think I'd have voted for Reagan, and yet ... a few night's after hearing this woman's compelling case for change, and in the fog of the first few days after my father's death, I voted ...

... and to this day cannot remember who got my vote.

It's like a black hole in my otherwise undeniably liberal history.

 

2000, voted for Nader. Didn't make a damn bit of difference in my state, of course.

As for the other question ... I'll pass.

 

Jack Kemp would have been an outstanding president back in the day. He was so smart, a leader, a Rockefeller-style Repuiblican who also had been a union organizer ... but he had zero charisma and a squeaky voice that never translated to TV very well. Had he looked and sounded like Mark Harmon, (a much-less-talented QB, I might add), Kemp could have been president.

We always got a Christmas card from the Kemps. The whitest-looking family in America, with their big smiles and blazers, lined up in order from tallest to shortest.

I also remember getting extremely hammered on election night, 1980, with some friends who might have been the only other people in the very red state I lived in at the time to vote for Carter that year.

(in my college apartment, on a Friday night just before spring break, with a woman who had very discernable tan lines I remember to this very day. She was a graduate student on the subject while I was in sex 101.)