Ms. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes nails things down again. Tip of the old scrub brush, with extra bubbles, to JD2718.
My father tended to vote Republican, too. For the first nine years of my life he remained a small business owner, in Burley, Idaho. When the workers at J. R. Simplot went out on strike one November (1961 as I recall, but I was a child), it doomed several furniture stores in and around Cassia County, and my parents’ was just one. For the rest of my life my father worked for other people, until he retired.
Still he voted Republican. He even had a union card, from the old plumbers and pipefitters union in Los Angeles, from when he worked on Liberty Ships during World War II. I never could figure it.
I do recall the stern lecture I got when I went to the Democrats’ mass meeting my first election, and then when I got elected as a delegate for McGovern and — the only one in my town, as I recall — I put up the McGovern bumpersticker (McGovern finished third in parts of Utah County, behind the American Party candidate). My father told me that no one in the family had ever voted Democratic before.
It was a great comic scene, somthing right out of Woody Allen. My father lecturing me about how voting Republican was rather a family duty, with my mother behind him shaking her head “no,” and mouthing “Don’t believe him. Not true. No.”
The only president I ever smuggled him in to see was Jimmy Carter. Carter showed up in Salt Lake City, and spoke in the Latter-day Saints’ Tabernacle on Temple Square, as I recall. I wangled the tickets, got Dad there and sat with him. Better than Christmas. Almost as good as when we watched Henry Mancini from nearly the same seats.
I don’t really know how my father would vote in this election, though. He was nervous about the civil rights campaigns, about Martin Luther King, Jr. He’d tell the stories about why he had problems with unions, about how the unions kept him from promoting African Americans he’d hire at United Cigar Stores in Los Angeles (before the Liberty Ship gig). And he’d say that he wouldn’t have any problem voting for a black man who had a history of accomplishment in areas outside of civil rights, too. He said he could vote for a black man from Harvard, someone who had the educational background of Kennedy, though he voted for Nixon against Kennedy (and Nixon twice more). Barack Obama might be the guy my father would have voted for.
Life sometimes imitates Thomas Kuhn’s observations about scientific revolutions. Sometimes the children have to go vote the interests of the parents, especially when the parents don’t, or won’t.
My father voted against Lyndon Johnson, too — twice. Johnson’s reforms of Social Security, designed to keep American senior citizens out of the county poor houses, kept my father out of poverty after he finally retired (at 75? 77?). The Republican businessmen he’d put his faith in managed to squander the pension funds he might have had, or cheat him out of the share of the business that would have kept him from having to rely on Social Security. My father put his faith in Republicans, but Lyndon Johnson rescued him.
I don’t know this “Joe the plumber.” I knew my father, the former plumber and pipefitter, the erstwhile small business owner, the man who worked from the time he was 14 to help his family get enough education to get out of poverty, first his sisters in college, then his own family. He never made enough to benefit from tax cuts for the rich. My father was real, and deserved better.
Go read Mrs. Cornelius’s story.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 