Me and politics -- 1

I'm quite sure everyone we knew in Arizona was Republican--shoot, even the liberals were Republican, as was the newspaper, the Arizona Republic. The Goldwater effect was very much alive, as was the man with dark-rimmed glasses. In the community where we lived, it was just about impossible to be a Democrat. Besides, my family was Republican, so I'd never done much thinking when it came to politics. The truth?--I'm embarrassed by how conservative I was back then,  but then so was everybody else.

So when we moved to Iowa, I told myself it was time--new place, new times, new rootedness--to participate in American political system, so I did. The Sioux County Republicans were meeting at TePaske Theater on some Thursday night that bicentennial fall, so I went, alone, and sat somewhere  in the back. I was a conservative, but I no right-winger. I'd attended a meeting of the local John Birch Society when I was in high school, a strangely clandestine gathering in the top floor of a lakefront mansion in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, maybe a dozen people who sat around watching a slide/tape program (remember those?) of shots featuring Martin Luther King shaking hands with men who were supposedly known communists. This was Wisconsin, after all, and blood from Sen. McCarthy's whacko hack jobs still pooled in the sandy soil hither and yon.

What I witnessed in TePaske Theater in August, 1976, was a political convention that made me ill because the dialogue was pretty much the same as it was in that little meeting in the lakefront mansion a decade ago. Men--I don't remember seeing any women--would raise their hands and contribute comments drawn from what seemed to me to be Depression-era sentiment. I wanted no part of it. My first political visit in our new home in Iowa was also my last. 

To say it turned me into a Democrat would be presumptive. I would have asked the age-old question back then about tigers changing stripes. It was impossible to think of myself as a Democrat. I didn't know my grandfathers' political leanings, but I knew I didn't have to ask--they were thoroughly Republican, as was my dad. I couldn't have thought of myself as Democratic. They were liberals, the sworn enemy for most of my life.

In the following years I tried to avoid party labels. I voted for McGovern, the prairie populist who promised to end the Vietnam war; but then I went Republican during the Bush years, trying to stay like W and his father somewhere close to the middle.

By '08, I'd had enough conservatism, enough tiddly-winks with wedge issues, enough clap-trap from the conservative world to make me look left, where I saw and heard someone who appeared out of nowhere, a guy with a horrible name that most conservatives opposed, not because he was black--of course, not because he was black. Of course. 

When the Iowa caucuses came around early in 2008, I'm not sure I had a political affiliation, but I had decided opinions, and those opinions formed around two particular candidates, this black guy with the awful name and, of all things, a woman named Hillary. But before the rise of anyone to the top, there were more candidates, including a liberal from New Mexico, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards, a politician a bald guy like me couldn't trust because he had such perfect hair.

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Tomorrow--memories of the '08 race.