I've been thinking about the sixteen times I've voted for Presidents.
On November 5th, I will cast my vote in the election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for president of the United States – the sixteenth time I'll vote in a presidential election. To date, I’ve voted with the victor seven times (1964, 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, 2020) and with the loser eight times (1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016).
Since the twenty-sixth Constitutional Amendment lowering the national voting age from twenty-one to eighteen wasn’t passed until 1971, I was too young to vote in the presidential election that wound up having the most impact on me, the 1960 contest between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. I grew up in a liberal Democratic family that didn’t like Nixon at all and saw Kennedy as a fresh new face, a fresh new voice. Like my father, Kennedy was from Boston, so they shared not only a birthplace but an unerasable Boston-Irish accent. Kennedy reminded us in his inaugural address that after eight years of the Eisenhower presidency, the torch has been passed to a new generation. I was hooked, so much so that nine years later – after Bobby was killed –we chose Kennedy as our son’s middle name. It isn’t JFKs 1960 electoral victory that still inhabits me, but what happened in Dallas a thousand days later.
Becky and I were married in September 1963, and left home in Hollywood to begin my seminary studies in Princeton. Two months later, Kennedy was murdered and suddenly the bright glow of marriage and a fresh generation of national leadership was engulfed in darkness. During our first experience of east-coast cold, we huddled with jacketed classmates in the student dining hall watching a small black and white TV from the Friday afternoon of his death until the riderless horse at the end of his funeral on Monday.
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I still think of that bleak weekend as the time when I suddenly grew up from political innocence and the promise of a personal future full of hope into the realization that politics and governance are serious business, and the future is as likely to be painful and sometimes tragic as it is to be joyous and triumphant. Sixty-one years later, approaching another presidential election, I still live with this ambivalence.
I voted for Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, who crushed Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. I remember a reprinted 1961 drawing by syndicated editorial cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock) that has lingered in my mind ever since as an enduring Republican perspective:
If you had any initiative, you'd go out and inherit a department store.
1968 was, month to month, the most tumultuous political year in my lifetime. I had become a political activist in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the previous years, but this was unceasing catastrophe on steroids, a persistent demand for activism, and a graduate course in what it means to be a responsible voter in this country.
January: The Tet Offensive begins in Vietnam, a moment that changed the course of the war.
February: The report of the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to examine the causes of race riots in American cities in previous years, declares that the nation is...moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.
March: In the New Hampshire primary, Eugene McCarthy finishes a close second to Lyndon Johnson, who withdraws from the race two weeks later.
April: Dr. King is murdered in Memphis.
May: 5,000 university students riot in Paris, representative of the restlessness of young people throughout the western world.
June: Bobby Kennedy is murdered in Los Angeles.
July: the Republican convention nominates Nixon as their presidential candidate.
August: Riots disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
September: The Soviet Union crushes the liberating Prague Spring.
October: Johnson orders a halt to all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam.
November: Nixon defeats Hubert Humphry by .7% of the popular vote. I still hated Nixon, and HHH was Johnson’s Vietnam-war vice president, so I felt trapped by a choice that, years later, I heard journalist Mort Zukerman label the evil of two lessers. To keep my conscience clean and to protest such an untenable choice, I vote for comedian Dick Gregory.
December: Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon and return safely to Earth.
I later learned what it feels like to lose politically, and to lose badly. I voted for the three candidates who suffered the most crushing presidential defeats in my lifetime. In 1972, I voted for Nixon’s opponent George Mc Govern, who won only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia (his grandson says that now, at 100 years old on October 1st, 2024, he wants to stay alive to vote for Kamala Harris), defeated Gerald Ford in post-Watergate 1976, then was crushed in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who also crushed Walter Mondale in 1984 – Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota. Mc Govern, Carter, Mondale: my personal trifecta of big time presidential losers.
As difficult as it was to learn to lose badly, it was equally infuriating to lose when you win, which happened to me twice. I voted for Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, each of whom won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. It required an adjustment to my understanding of democracy when my candidate wins but doesn’t win.
Protesters at a Tea Party Protest in Minnesota in 2010 (Credit: Fibonnaci Blue/Flcikr.com)
In the fall of 2008, I voted for Barack Obama, our first black president. Silly me: I thought his election would relieve the racial tensions that have only flared up in years since. The Tea Party was soon waving signs proclaiming We want our Country Back, Donald Trump and others were challenging Obama’s birthplace and therefore the legitimacy of his citizenship and presidency, and we began to hear the now-persistent racist dog whistle to Make America Great Again that is the soundtrack of Donald Trump’s political life.
Not too long into what would become the MAGA years, I realized I’d been riding high for decades on a sense of perpetual progress, the triumph of ideas I deeply believed in. Despite bitter political conflict and split votes, we’d passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, women had clawed their way out of suppression to a place of near-equality and unforeseen power, abortion was protected by Roe, LGBTQ people had won wide public acceptance and in 2014 the right to marry, and we’d twice elected a Black president by significant majorities.
So MAGA was a blunt surprise. The bigotry and violence I assumed had been marginalized had instead been hiding under rocks. Before 2008, it had become socially inappropriate to articulate the vulgar vocabularies of racism or antisemitism or anti-immigrants, let alone to make these vile convictions the center of a political movement and, slowly but certainly, the definition of one of our two national political parties. Election night, 2016, was a sledgehammer to my political forehead. I realized that I lived in a country in which half the populations were as much strangers to me as I was the them. It was my darkest political moment since November 22, 1963 in Dallas.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the second presidential debate in October 2016. AFP via Getty Images.
As the 2016 election approached, certain of Hillary’s victory, I made plans to go to her inauguration on January 20th, 2017. Oops! November 8th, 2016: change of plans. Why bother going to what seemed so much like a political wake?
But then I heard about the Million Women March, to be held in D.C. the day after Trump’s inauguration. I found myself jammed on the Mall in D. C. with more than a million people, (a larger crowd than for Trump’s inauguration the day before), not just protesting the election but also committing to resist what we correctly feared would be the MAGA agenda. It felt like I was back in the 1960s - marching and organizing and living in resistance to the government, as I had with Johnson and Nixon. At a booth on the Mall, I bought two matching decals that I posted on either edge of my car’s rear window; I scraped them off on January 21st, 2020.
A few days after Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, and his advisor, Kelly Ann Conway, used the phrase alternative facts to explain their insistence that Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than Obama’s eight years earlier, and was in fact the largest inaugural crowd ever. From that moment nearly eight years ago until this morning’s news, Trump litters his spoken and written comments with obvious and sometimes ludicrous lies.
Two that stand out for me, and disqualify him as a trustworthy candidate for president, are his insistence that he won the 2020 election and his denial of any role in initiating and failing to try to stop the assault on the nation’s capital on January 6th, 2021. Honesty, integrity, truth, and facts have ceased to define Trump’s politics, legal woes, presidency, and now his candidacy.
It's become an Alice in Wonderland of political logic. If the facts support my position, facts are important. If the facts don’t support my position there must be alternative facts (formerly known as lies) that align with how I feel about something. Speaker Mike Johnson recently observed that the facts don’t support his belief that Trump won the 2020 vote, but he feels like Trump won – his feeling supersedes any conclusion based upon evidence.
Then there’s this need in the mainstream press to draw a moral, legal, and political equivalence between the two sides. Harris has changed her mind on fracking, funding the police, drilling for oil, and climate change, so she cannot be trusted. Then as if it were somehow an equivalent set of failures, Trump has been twice impeached, convicted in New York civil court for business fraud, paying off an adult film actress to influence an election, and committing what the judge called rape in assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room.
Then there are the thirty-four federal criminal indictments for falsifying business records, and the pending trials for taking documents, including national security records, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, interfering in the 2020 election in Georgia, and instigating and refusing to stop the January 6th assault on Congress.
As weird as it seems, somehow these two candidates are subjected to the same scrutiny and similar character condemnation - politicians are all liars! - for these two lists of failures that are in no way comparable.
There are several key policy issues that matter to me and many Americans of both parties: immigration, the economy, abortion, health care. I can argue these and on occasion see the truth in my opponents’ opinions. But I have no tolerance for alternative facts in politics, personal relationships, religion, or self-examination. And the moral, legal, and political equivalency attached to each candidate’s failures seems to me a failure of nerve on the part of the media to do their job of distinguishing between what is true and what is false.
I’m about to vote for president for the sixteenth time. At 83 years old, I’m not worried about my own future; however many years I have left, Becky and I have the resources to ensure that we’ll be fine.
But when I think of my grandchildren – nineteen, sixteen, and twelve years old – I grieve the prospect of their future defined (no matter who wins this year) by an authoritarian movement of Christian Nationalists and politicians who base their policies on alternative facts.
I’ve been the blessed beneficiary of a democracy that, for all its frustrating flaws, has allowed me and my extended family and friends to thrive, and has been the haven for all kinds of marginalized people who have found freedom here, a chance to prosper that holds out hope for a better life for them and their families. There’s been very little struggle in my decision to support Ms. Harris: I want my children and grandchildren to live in a democratic culture and to pass it on to however many generations of heirs they might have.
