Been wrong so long it looks like up to me

The first time I voted it was against Dick Nixon but then I got to do it again and the taste was sour. The first time was in my apartment in North Conway in 1968. A gaggle of us watched the tube and comically commentated while sucking down suds and spliffs. One of my old high school buddies was the only one pulling for the Trickster. He’s now a Federal Appellate Judge in D.C. who mentions Bush in his Christmas letter. The counting dragged out late into the night and I passed out thinking the old Happy Warrior (Hubert Horatio Humprhrey, for any of you not old enough) had won.

Four years later I remember fairly running along the streets of Georgetown after work heading to an election eve party no less tame than the one just mentioned. I had been working for McGovern in Maryland and California and was a volunteer for the DNC at the Watergate during the time it was robbed. My friends had bought a Nixon candle which had a wick on the top and was alit when I arrived. Cathy Medd said, “There calling it a landslide with 6 percent of the vote in.” I was crushed.

I voted for Carter but without enthusiasm. I voted against the Gipper cheerfully, twice, but I went for his veep against the Duke. Clinton was a no brainer. But then I got my ass handed to me when Antonin Scalia elected poor George Bush. Four years later I went to bed thinking John Kerry would be reporting for duty at 1600 PA Ave. I woke up at one in the morning being told by the scary visage of James Carville that there would be four more years of the nincompoop-in-chief.

A year ago I would have bet anybody that I would be voting for a pant-suit presidency on this very day. That did not happen. Although I had said that I wouldn’t have to hold my nose to vote for Hil, I wanted the skinny kid. I liked his easy grace and obvious intelligence. I thought, “Hell, I’d vote for him even if he was white.” And today I did just that.

My friend Billy Richards couldn’t even get a hair cut in the same leafy town in Connecticut where we lived when we were in High School. Nor was he going to be asked to join the Yacht Club. I wonder how he felt today when he filled in that teeny little oval that will choose an African-American to be the next president of the United States.