Political awakenings...

Our PoliSci professor asked that we give him a paper on our first moments of political awareness. Most of the kids in our class are too young to remember JFK or even Tricky Dick in his third go-round. I, on the other hand, was born when FDR was still in office, and vaguely remember Plainspeaking Harry Truman, who make the truly ballsy decision to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the was with Japan with two very big bangs. I was 5 when that happened. My first awareness of the process came in the 1951 campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the general that commanded our forces in Europe during the war. Ike was this totally bald, benign guy who loved golf. He had a little moon-faced wife named Mamie who wore cunning little hats with flowers on them and smiled all the time. His opponent was Adlai Stevenson, a senator from, I think, Illinois, who was bright and articulate. Neither was an appropriate candidate; Ike was too inexperienced in the political arena, and Adlai was an egghead, far to acerbic for the taste of his blue-collar party, the Democrats. My parents were small business people, and felt the Republicans represented their interests. This was before they allied themselves with the Christian right and started to try to legislate our family lives. Anyway, I was a Republican for a long time after that, because it is what I knew. And yesterday in class, I was the only one who had broken with her parents in my political affiliation. Interesting. And Tricky Dick was Ike's Vice President. I never voted for that man, not then (well, I was only 7), not when he ran for governor of California, not when he ran for President twice, and I was still a Republican then. In fact, it is the kiss of death for most politicians if I vote for them. But I always vote, anyway. Even if I am not a college graduate.