The Person, Not the Party

I remember well watching my first presidential convention during the 1960 campaign, sitting in front of a black-and-white television eager to know what was happening. Like any other inquisitive child, I asked my father who he was supporting.

Kennedy.

"I generally support the underdog," he said.

That carried a lot of influence at an early age and many years following. Though my father was a registered Democrat, and generally voted Democratic, he was quick to point out that he voted the person, not the party, that he felt was best for the country or the community at the time.

Most election years, my father came back from voting with my mother, and we'd learn that they'd cancelled each other out in the polling booth. My mother, the product of a family that produced many local politicians who'd originally run as Democrats, had been swept away in a post-50's movement in the LDS Church that had run more to the Republican Party, where people felt that in order to be faithful members they had to vote to the right.

A state away, we watched a number of election controversies take place in Utah, including periodic votes on liquor-by-the-drink, and Democratic candidates running for Governor or Senator in the State of Utah. In the cattle and oil county we inhabited in southwestern Wyoming, dynastic cattle families could be generally assured to be voting Republican.

Four years later, we'd lost a president to an assassin's bullet. That took on special significance to the daughter of a Kennedy supporter, and rose the man to mythic stature among much of the American landscape. My best friend's father was supporting Barry Goldwater, and I got my first taste of the nature of political campaigns. They were blood sport, putting teams out onto a field and cheering for the favorite, or putting two contenders into the ring and hoping "our guy" would win. I couldn't understand how someone who was my friend could come from such a different point of view.

The sixties brought people clamoring for change, figureheads who went to untimely deaths, struggles against an unpopular war, and discrimination, and inhibition. They also brought us Richard Nixon.

I was in college when he resigned in shame in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The candidate the LDS Church had allowed to speak from the pulpit at the Salt Lake Tabernacle had gone down in flames, and I was campaigning as a Young Democrat at BYU for Utah Congressman Wayne Owens in his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat against Republican Jake Garn. When he lost, he was suddenly given a position as Mission President in Montreal, Canada.

It wasn't easy being a Young Democrat at BYU. At the time, it was akin to being a member of the Black Panther Party or SDS there. Lone gentile at a bar mitzvah. Suddenly, it was 1976, and the incumbent unexpectedly elevated Vice President Gerald Ford was running against an upstart from the south, Jimmy Carter, who represented change, and hope. He seemed to be one of the people. Again, I learned what it was like to have a best friend have everything else in common with me, and argue for the opposition. It was clear a dairy farmer's daughter from Idaho had brought with her her own set of family prejudices and predispositions, just as I had, daughter of a working class father of six, daughter of a father who said, "I vote for the person, not the party, but we generally champion the underdog."

The person, not the party.

But in all those years, the person had always been Democrat. It was Democratic ideals that most nearly reflected our worldview, our aspirations. We went to bed at night listening to "Abraham, Martin and John" sung mournfully over the radiowaves beamed from Oklahoma City.

Carter blew it, there was no doubt, but my anger towards a former B-movie star who'd elevated himself to Governor of California reached a peak when he got manipulated the release of American hostages to influence an election. We then entered what I perceived to be eight of the bleakest years of American life. But I noticed something happening, all around me. There was a change in the wind. Young people who ordinarily wouldn't be championing conservative causes were suddenly becoming Young Republicans, because of this tidal wave of change. Freshmen were entering the university not intent on getting a general liberal arts education, but specializing in business, and computers, and management. Something definitely had shifted under our feet.

And the Gipper had done it.

I put my head down low for eight years, hoping we'd all survive it. When it was revealed following his White House exit that he had Alzheimer's, I joined those who were not the least surprised.

Meanwhile, election after election, the Democratic Party paraded out a seemingly endless stream of Minnesota milquetoast, Humphries and Mondales. When both Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis arrived on the stage, I was encouraged. Maybe the Democrats could actually win. Gary Hart threw his away on a boat, and Dukakis on a tank. Things weren't looking good for the Dems. We were resigned to live the rest of our lives under the rule of hawkish Republicans who'd march us off to war while their wives sported big eagle broaches with diamonds while hosting teas. Oliver North, and the Iran-Contra affair, seemed to typify what was wrong with America.

The year I married my husband, we both voted in the election the morning we drove to Milwaukee to pick out my wedding dress. We went first to my polling place, then to his, then off to the Pfister Hotel that night where I had a business meeting for the weekend to watch returns.

It occurred to me, we hadn't discussed how we voted. We'd been so busy in the previous weeks leading up to our engagement, the election really hadn't been a topic. We sat there at the Pfister that night, watching the returns come in, and for the first time, discussed politics. Who did you vote for? I asked.

Fortunately, we'd voted for the same person, and both breathed a sigh of relief.

That discussion about politics was illuminating. My husband's story interwove the same campaigns from my past into the present. 1960, he'd been asked to be the person who escorted JFK and Jackie Kennedy around the local county. He had his oldest son pulling a little red wagon through the neighborhood with Kennedy flyers, knocking on doors. Later, he and his first wife were invited to the inauguration.

But my husband also told a story, and a worldview, that reflected my own. "We vote the person, not the party," he said. Like me, he'd rarely voted a straight ticket, although he'd generally self-identified as a Democrat. We laughed at how there were those who thought he was a Republican, and those who swore he was Democrat, all based on superficial judgments. He was a successful businessman--wouldn't it stand to reason he was Republican? He was an Irish Catholic from Chicago--wouldn't it stand to reason he was a Kennedy Democrat? He went through much of his adult life friends with governors, senators and congressmen of both parties.

Both of us have had life experiences that have made us convinced that the greater good of a nation, and a community, was best served in voting the person, and not the party, and not feeling the blindsighted allegiance to party over all.

As we have with most elections since we married, we've looked at the available choices for Commander in Chief and made our own judgments about who would be best for the country at any given time. Fortunately, those judgments have always lined up.

Four years ago, the first determinative act my husband did after entering the hospital in early August was to vote absentee ballot in the Kerry-Bush election. We'd spent several days discussing the issues, and the candidates, and I wanted to be sure he understood both clearly before casting a vote, when he'd been unconscious in a hospital bed for weeks beforehand. It was clear he had a grasp of the issues, and the candidates. And he cast his vote.

That same little boy who toted the red wagon for Kennedy in 1960 went on to be a Kennedy devotee, a champion of the party, and by 2004 was on Kerry's steering committee.

In the same family, however, his brother, ten years his junior, is a diehard conservative who has a completely different worldview, separated primarily by, it seems, the Reagan years. That younger brother typifies what I observed in my later years at BYU--a tide had turned, and there was a generation of conservatives coming forward. The two brothers could not be more different. One would expect both to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but they're not.

The night the Bush-Gore election hung by a thread in Florida, that youngest called me late into the night at our Florida home desperate for information. It was as though his entire future hung in the balance of the outcome of Florida.

Many in the country felt the same way. Not all agreed on the desired outcome, but the sense that it was a pivotal election was palpable.

Gore's gone on his way and on to Nobel greatness and Hollywood awards. Edwards, my boy from four years ago, has gone on to general limbo of those who commit political suicide.

I apologize to those who feel I should be championing party loyalty over any desire for having the best person run our country. My mindset and worldview has been shaped by my own unique life experiences. At this point in my life, despite sympathies to certain ideals over others that more closely align with one party than another, I resist the notion that I need to vote a straight ticket, or vote for a certain candidate, because of party affiliation. At the beginning of this election season, I took a good look at the entire field, and felt strongly that one candidate was superior to the others, and supported that candidate to the best of my ability. But it was not a judgment I took likely. I do not believe that automatically meant I had to vote for my party's nominee, even if it was not that person.

I am unapologetically moderate at this point in my life, very liberal in some ways and equally conservative in others. My country is important to me; I do not regarding voting as an act of frivolity. I want to know about the person who's going to have the nuclear codes. It's less important to me that they are perfect, worship the same God (or none at all), or have more or fewer homes than I do. I care less than I did in the anti-Vietnam sixties if that person has served in the military; I care less that I did when Walter Mondale tapped Geraldine Ferraro for issues relating to token race and gender. I dream, as I've frequently noted, of a colorblind and genderblind society, where candidates and campaigns aren't focused on a single community, a single target voting bloc, a single set of sympathies and sensibilities.

I fully respect those who choose to align their allegiances without question to a particular political party and campaign, volunteer, contribute and vote accordingly. I won't be branded a traitor for making my own best judgments about candidates seeking the highest office in the land, and will make them clean of conscience. And I do that in honor and tribute to a wonderful father, long gone, and with a nod to a supportive husband, still here, both of whom emphasized a philosophy that is also my own, "The person, not the party."