My Dad's Vote

Growing up, we always watched the evening news over dinner in my house. First came Chet Curtis and Natalie Jacobson, “Chet and Nat”, the married anchors of local News Center 5. They were an institution in Boston during the 80’s. Dick Albert did the weather, which was shorter than it is now, and Mike Lynch covered sports, which got much more airtime before ESPN came along. They were followed up by World News Tonight and Peter Jennings, who my grandfather had nicknamed “Blinky” for his rapid eye movements, and who years later, after two separate planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, would do more to comfort and reassure me than my President did.

I had friends who were absolutely forbidden to watch television at the table. Dinner was a time for quiet family conversation, when parents would ask how school was and children would lie and say it was great, when brothers would harass sisters and would tattle on brothers, and when fathers would inhale their food and head to the living room because first pitch at Fenway was at 7:05. Not in my house.

In my house we watched the NEWS, all the news, and the news is what stimulated conversation. This was before the internet, before cable news (although CNN was around but nobody would really discover it until the Gulf War), and before the 24-hour news circle. Those hours before primetime were all you had to get you caught up on what happened since the morning paper, and to hold you over until tomorrow’s paper thumped against the front door.

My Dad was a Democrat, a Union member, and a life long resident of the bluest state in the country. His politics were easy to figure—and they naturally shaped my own. We didn’t like Ronald Reagan, even though most of the country did, and by 1986 we were reasonably sure that he had gone senile. We did like Michael Dukakis, even after 1988. Oliver North was a villain from the very beginning of the Iran/Contra scandal, the judges Reagan nominated for the Supreme Court were hacks, and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil was a “straight shooter” who we could trust. I didn’t quite know where the Middle East was but I did know that nothing good ever seemed to happen there. (Some of my views changed over time, maybe even most, but not that last one.)

Those dinners helped me to develop a love of politics, and of history, at a young age. I was fascinated by voting, by elections, and I couldn’t wait to get old enough to take part myself. I didn’t understand (and still don’t understand) how anyone could choose not to vote. It just never made sense. I’d often hear adults claim that they had been busy, or too tired, or a myriad of other reasons why they had skipped out on voting. My Dad had to be work at 5am and he was rarely home before 5pm, and he always managed to make it to the polls. People who said they couldn’t find the time, to me, seemed soft. Voting was history as it happened. How could anyone sit it out?

My fascination with the political grew stronger as I grew older. In January of 2004, I had just finished up at UMass and was living within shouting distance of my parents for the first time in a few years. I was also looking for a job, any job, and was as dirt poor as I had ever been. My Mother lives in constant fear that I’m not eating enough—mortal, constant fear, a fear handed down to her from her mother, my Nana, who herself lives in constant fear of the very same thing. Knowing that I was living up the street and suspecting that I wasn’t eating enough, the dinner invitations from my parents came often that winter.

One such night I spent with them was the night of the New Hampshire primary. There was little drama that night. John Kerry won big, as he already had in Iowa. Howard Dean had fizzled out even before the scream. John Edwards had failed to materialize into the contender he always had the potential to be. (Four years and another failed candidacy later and we are still waiting.)

My Dad was happy. He had settled on Kerry as his guy. I was still unsure. As I had grown up, my politics had diverged somewhat from his. When I registered to vote for the first time, I did so as an Independent. I’ve never looked back or been registered as anything but. I liked Kerry then and still like him now, but that night I was still unsure of him as a Presidential candidate. He lacked that certain gravitas that I’ve always believed a Democrat needs to win the White House. This, more than anything else, killed Kerry in the end and sentenced us all to another four years of George W. Bush.

We ate, chatted, and watched the results come in. It was a good night, and when the invite came again the following Tuesday I jumped at it. Pretty soon it became our routine on primary nights. It was fun, even during what amounted to a dull campaign. As this election season drew closer I had begun to really look forward to doing it all again. The last few years it had been harder and harder to find the time to get over and see my parents. Or maybe the truth is that had become easier and easier to find a reason not go. The elections were going to provide a ready-made reason to go.

Life, of course, intervened, and we won’t have the chance.

I’ve found myself thinking often these last few weeks about who my father would have voted for in a campaign that was so wide open. The day he got sick, after he had been sent home from work and my Mother and I had rushed over to check on him, I sat with him at the kitchen table, making light conversation and trying to gauge what was wrong. He was confused, sometimes having trouble finding the right words and sometimes just using the wrong words and not knowing it. He told me that the Celtics were the best team in football, and that he had just seen the new George Washington movie. It took hearing several renditions of the story for me to understand that George’s first name was actually Denzel.

Dad thought he was making perfect sense, and maybe sometimes he was. We live in strange times, and when the topic of politics comes up, maybe it is best to expect strange answers.

He asked if I had a candidate yet and I replied that I didn’t. I was leaning towards Joe Biden at the time, but it was far from a done deal in my mind. I asked him the same question, and even knowing full well that his faculties were diminished, his answer still shocked me.

“Rudy Giuliani.”

Now, if my Dad had failed to find a winner in what was a large but underwhelming crop of Democrats, he wouldn’t have been alone. It’s even possible that he looked at the GOP. After all, Hillary was still the presumptive nominee at that point, and Dad was no fan. There were many reasons why. The factory job that used to get him up at 5am had disappeared in 1999—one more blue-collar casualty in the age of NAFTA. Universal healthcare had recently become a reality in Massachusetts, and very quickly it had proven to be an idea that looked better on paper than it did in practice. Plus, I think Dad had begun to sour on the machine that is the Democratic Party in the Commonwealth, and that machine is firmly under Hillary Clinton’s control this time around.

But at the same time, I have a hard time believing he would have necessarily embraced Barack Obama. That Obama is black wouldn’t have bothered my Dad, but name might have. Names were never his strong suit, and the prospect of struggling to remember “Barack Obama” for the next four years may have proven a task Dad just wasn’t up for. But by Super Tuesday there weren’t too many other choices out there.

So, yes, it is possible that he looked across the aisle for a candidate—but I don’t think it’s very probable. It would have required a reappraisal at middle age of certain long-held beliefs that I just don’t think Dad made. And even if he did, I can’t see him landing on Giuliani. “The Mayor” is a lot of things, not the least of which is a Yankees fan that evokes 9/11 the way phony Catholics evoke the name of God. Maybe a Republican was going to win over my father, but a slick New Yorker never was.

When he told me he was thinking of voting for Rudy Giuliani, in an afternoon filled with all the wrong words, I knew he was in worse shape than he did. In the moment it was almost funny—but only because there was no reason to believe that it was the last real conversation he and I would ever have.

Now I’m left wondering what he really meant.

(Original Post Date: 2/15/2008)