Why I Vote as I Do

As a young teenager, I once asked Dad why he voted Republican, term after term after term.

A lawyer by trade, he told me he was a Republican, because that party had a philosophy of government which he said pretty much coincided with his own. His party, he said, believed the individual would help himself if he could be left alone by the government. Had he ever voted Democratic? Well, he hadn't yet, and he couldn't anticipate a time when he would. His was the party of Lincoln, he said, and that was all he needed to say. I was so awed by the Great Rail-Splitter and Emancipator, from what I had learned in grade school, that I swallowed all questions I had of him (Dad, not Abe).

When, the same day, I asked Mom why she voted Democratic, she said she didn't really know, but she said she didn't believe in political parties, she voted for the candidate himself. Her Uncle Charles had worked in the White House for President Warren Harding, but she'd always leaned toward the Democratic party, because, she said, they always ran the candidate she believed was the better man.

That was in 1952. When the Republican Ike won over the Democratic Adlai Stevenson, Dad stepped over the back fence and joined neighboring lawyer Ken Gayle for a small celebration with a six-pack of beer. When I went upstairs to console Mom, she said she'd ended up voting for Stevenson anyway, because Dad told her to. That was one of the stunning moments in my early education. Why did she feel she had to vote for the candidate favored by Dad? Well, it turned out she never stood up to Dad, and I could only stand there in the living room with my jaw on the floor. Well, as it turned out, Ike was probably the better choice, at least if we're to trust the judgment of noted American political scientists and commentators these days. As I subsequently learned, there were a great number of American voters who routinely voted as their husbands did. And, in retrospect, I believe that Mom's admission was one not-so-little part of my later decision to embrace the women's movement and the Democratic Party. Funny how those things work, isn't it?

I don't, incidentally, write against George W. Bush because he's Republican. I write against George W. Bush because he's George W. Bush.

As a youngster, I learned more about Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt than about her husband the President. Mom adored Eleanor, and she didn't have to ignore Dad's wishes to do that. And that adoration kind of washed over me, and I became a believer. The press, of course, loved her, too, and I learned much from newspapers, the pro-Eleanor stories, even cartoons. There had been one 1936 New Yorker cartoon that showed two coal miners chatting on the job, one pointing to a figure ahead of them and saying, "My God, Joe, it's Eleanor Roosevelt!" When I asked Mom what it meant, she said Mrs. Roosevelt was a staunch defender of the laborer and farmer and all those people who didn't have a fair share of the American pie, especially in a country run by the wealthy, who were represented by President Herbert Hoover. Mom and Dad, talking honestly, had vastly different views of American politics, and I early began leaning Mom's way of viewing things political. Dad's view of things always seemed to hinge on money matters, Mom's always seemed to take human beings into account.

To a 10-year-old, the human side of things always came through first.

My first opportunity to vote was in the 1960 election. I subsequently heard that political experts blamed Nixon's defeat on his awful make-up job during his television debate with John Kennedy, but I doubted it. How, I thought, could the American electorate be so superficial as to let a man's make-up determine his/her choice of Presidential candidates? Nixon spoke like a glib, smooth-talking middle-aged politician, who had forgotten to shave. Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, looked like an energetic, optimistic, fighter- for-the-right-things kind of politician who, despite a whispy, sopranoish wife who didn't sound too bright, might bring a new perspective to the White House. I eagerly voted for him, then, the night of the election, announced to my father that I'd cancelled out his vote.

In the years immediately following Kennedy's election, I read and learned a bit about Franklin D. Roosevelt. I came to believe that, opposed to the Republican Presidents, who had simply let things take their course (including Hoover, who was stymied by the outbreak of the great Depression in 1932), there was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had creatively used all the powers of government to meet the Great Depression head-on, creatively. It seemed to me that Republican presidents were content to let the poor get themselves out of their hole, Democratic presidents were compassionate enough to realize that sometimes the poor were not wholly responsible for their own plight and needed some help from their government to get themselves back on track.

In a college political science class, I learned that European voters vote for the politician and how he operates to get things done for his constituents, no matter what his extra-curricular behavior. Americans, on the other hand, vote for the personality of their leaders, no matter what their earlier political accomplishments. Thus, when the story broke of Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, I thought the man should be booted out of office. I later changed my mind, when I stood back and took stock of his actual political accomplishments, and when I contrasted the man with our current President, George W. Bush.

Dad was philosophically a Republican, mom a Democrat. What was I? Could a voter vote a particular party with any assurance that the candidate would perform as his party affiliation suggested he would? I came to doubt it. How much influence did a candidate's political affiliation have on his performance in the White House? Probably a good bit, but not always or a hundred percent. Was it better to vote according to party or according to the particular candidate? That remains a mystery to me.

The only thing of which I'm sure is that if a political candidate like Eleanor Roosevelt were ever to run again, I'd vote for her in a heart beat.