Monday, December 04, 2017

It Was a More Innocent Time


With the passing of John Anderson, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the biggest voting mistake I ever made:  throwing my first vote for president away on Mr. Anderson, because Reagan was obviously insane and Carter was insufficiently pure.

 It is not a mistake I ever made again.

I was also not alone in making it -- some of the smartest people I knew were getting drunk off the same cork.



So little changes.

Except the consequences.  




Behold, a Tip Jar!


13 comments:

RaflW said...

I can't stop looking at those eye glasses. Wow.

Knight of Nothing said...

Snyder was a pretty good interviewer! Wouldn't it be nice if today's talking heads could have an informed discussion on a variety of subjects without shouting at each other?

Ellison's thoughts about Prop 13 have not aged well.

drbopperthp said...

John Anderson Drifty????

Duncan Watson said...

My Mom voted for Anderson. My Dad and I were unhappy about it. It actually is one of the things that bridged the gap of distrust from my college years.

Mr.Shemp said...

Ah, to be young again. We've all made mistakes, drifty.

Great interview with Harlan. Love listening to his chats with Synder. Just picked up a copy of AN EDGE IN MY VOICE - looking forward to reading it.

About the only person doing great in-depth interviews currently is Marc Maron, and that's a podcast. Nothing on TV comes close, but I'd love to hear that I'm wrong.

Anonymous said...

Anderson was the reason for my own moment of insanity during which I registered (R) for my first chance to participate in a Presidential election.

Like Driftglass (evidently), I could see that Ronnie Raygun was feeding his party the monkey brains (h/t Charlie Pierce) & I was righteously horrified by the prospect.

I'd have been unlikely to vote for Anderson in the general, but hoped to lend a bit of sanity to the GOP in the primary.

Ah, the naivety of youth. Living in Pennsyltucky, I had failed to take into account the primary schedule. PA is late in the process, & well before the campaign came to us Y'all Quaida had locked up Raygun as the Rape-Public-Con nominut. The rest is tragic history we all know far too well.

I changed my registration back to (D) & have seen no reason to alter it since.

Anonymous said...

Anderson was the reason for my own moment of insanity during which I registered (R) for my first chance to participate in a Presidential election.

Like Driftglass (evidently), I could see that Ronnie Raygun was feeding his party the monkey brains (h/t Charlie Pierce) & I was righteously horrified by the prospect.

I'd have been unlikely to vote for Anderson in the general, but hoped to lend a bit of sanity to the GOP in the primary.

Ah, the naivety of youth. Living in Pennsyltucky, I had failed to take into account the primary schedule. PA is late in the process, & well before the campaign came to us Y'all Quaida had locked up Raygun as the Rape-Public-Con nominut. The rest is tragic history we all know far too well.

I changed my registration back to (D) & have seen no reason to alter it since.

dinthebeast said...

We're only now, thirty something years later starting to undo some of the damage prop 13 did to our state, and the schools in particular.
They passed it the year I got out of high school, so I got in just under the wire, but our schools, which I know the value of when they're funded, went straight to hell after the money was cut off.
I would feel for residents of Kansas right now if they weren't about to elect Kobach to replace Brownback.

-Doug in Oakland

Pretzelogic in Philly, PA said...

Gaa. Sorry for the double post. Was having some tech issues & didn't think either attempt worked. :-/

Jason said...

Interesting post. About the closest I came to a youthful indiscretion vote was going in full hog on Howard Dean during the primaries of 2004. I wanted him to win badly and after the yawp! heard around the world (can you fucking believe in the age of Trump that a slightly excited scream would undo a candidate?) I had to shift to Kerry...yet another victim of Dem cowardliness in the face of republican dirty tricks. Nonetheless I had learned by that time that despite any misgivings I would have about a candidate, choosing the so called lesser of two evils was always a worthwhile vote because policies made by an administration will affect lives...period. Every day, seeing the bullshit Trump peddles and the blood letting policies being pushed and voted on, I think of the precious pure progressives who continue to talk about hating Clinton and how little they regret their anti dem vote. I think how close they are to republicans in how irresponsible their attitude is. It's very sad. Susan Sarandon and Jimmy Dore and others like them, I wonder if they will ever get past their ego and their altruistic fantasy world to appreciate how their vote helped create the magnitude of damage fucker Trump and his cronies have done.

JHB said...

Driftglass, my friend, I am here to give you, I say, here to give you aaaab-so-lu-shun. The absolution of the numbers:

If every single Anderson vote had gone to Carter, he would have picked up 11 more states but would still have fallen short, with Reagan winning both the electoral (331-207) and popular (by, gratingly, 3 million) votes.

Under this Anderson-to-Carter scenario, there are four states that would have been within 1% of flipping from Reagan to Carter: Alabama, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and your own Illinois. Carter would have had to flip three of them, including both of the big ones.

That's tens of thousands of votes that had to have changed, on top the entire Anderson count, for Carter to win.

The first rule of 1980 election is "if you don't mention Hostage Crisis, it ain't about the 1980 election". That's the only factor that would have shifted the election in Carter's favor, and we know Club Pachyderm already had a plan for that.

Cirze said...


I remember having this HUGE argument with my boyfriend. He thought he was soooo farsighted.

And I said "YOU'RE THROWING YOUR VOTE AWAY!!! YOU'RE VOTING FOR REAGAN!!!!!!"

Davis said...

I confess that I voted for Anderson, too. I never talk about it because I am so ashamed. I hope to meet Jimmy Carter some day to apologize. I did vote for Hubert Humphrey and was angry at the left for not supporting him.