Nixon, Reagan, George W Bush: for me, a lifetime Democrat, all of their elections were disappointments. I can remember each well. In 1968 it took until Wednesday morning to determine the winner between Vice President Humphrey and Nixon. I was sitting in my seventh grade history class on the second floor of Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering, Ohio. The Principal came on the PA and announced Nixon\u2019s victory. Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, was overwhelmingly Republican back then, and the whole school burst out in wild cheers and applause. All I could do was put my head down on the desk in sadness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my early professional political jobs was as a field coordinator with the Carter\/Mondale campaign in 1976. I remember the joy of walking across Cincinnati\u2019s Fountain Square at four in the morning after that election night, exhausted from the efforts, but ebullient in the victory over Gerald Ford. Four years later, I was a teacher in Pataskala, and could do little but despair as Carter became as trapped as the fifty-two Iranian hostages, unable to free himself to wage a serious campaign against Reagan. And the Reagan era had all of the horrors I anticipated. Reagan destroyed labor unions, armed America with expensive and outlandish weapons, and \u201cfreed\u201d public education by taking away Federal funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there was 2000.\u00a0\u00a0I was still in Pataskala, but Mom and Dad were \u201csnow-birds\u201d in Florida.\u00a0\u00a0I spent Thanksgiving week there, watching the desperate ballot counts, eyeballs on\u00a0\u00a0the hanging chads, over and over.\u00a0\u00a0Clearly, Florida was within any \u201cmargin of error\u201d, and the Gore and Bush legal teams both went to great lengths to support their candidate.\u00a0\u00a0 Bush was willing to pull any lever, push any button, walk across any line; his team would do whatever it took to win.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It didn\u2019t hurt that the Florida Secretary of State was a Bush campaign chairman, and the Governor was his brother. But what really threw me, was that the Supreme Court took a side based on partisan lines, five Republicans out-voting four Democrats on the Bench to put Bush in office. I didn\u2019t foresee the Justices putting their thumbs on that political scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only on December 13th<\/sup>, when Al Gore went on national television to tell us to let it go, did I even tolerate the results. And it wasn\u2019t until the weeks after 9\/11 that I finally accepted George W Bush as the \u201ctrue\u201d President of the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nixon, Reagan, Bush:\u00a0\u00a0each of their elections \u201churt\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But I never thought that any of them, even Richard Nixon, represented a threat to our American democracy.\u00a0\u00a0We were of different political parties and different ideologies; but we were all still a part of the American experience.\u00a0\u00a0While I often disagreed with what they did, I could see that we had a common interest in the process of making \u201ca more perfect union\u201d, the American Creed.\u00a0\u00a0It was sometimes the only saving grace of those years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n America<\/em>n Creed – 1917<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, a democracy in a republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.<\/em> I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Republican or Democrat, Clinton or Dole, even Dukakis or Bush; we all still had that common creed. We were all Americans, \u201c\u2026Dedicated to the proposition that all men (and women)<\/em> are created equal\u201d. Sharing that belief, we could sometimes reach out beyond partisan differences. When Bush spoke on the \u201cpile\u201d in New York the week after 9-11 he said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We weren\u2019t Democrats or Republicans then; we were Americans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thursday night I watched most of Mr. Trump\u2019s acceptance speech at the MAGA-Republican Convention in Milwaukee. There is a new \u201cvibe\u201d in Trump\u2019s World. Trump implied that he is now \u201canointed\u201d by God, who directed the bullet, or Trump\u2019s head, away from certain death. The MAGA crowd looked up at him in religious awe. Trump called on America to unite with him, his unsaid statement; \u201cthis is God\u2019s will\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That portion of his speech was beautifully choregraphed and written. He laid a gentle kiss, a blessing, on the helmet of the firefighter who died in the attack protecting his children. And then it was off on the campaign rant, everything about our horrible economy (the day after the Dow Jones set a new record over 41,000 points<\/em>); unbelievable inflation \u201clike no one\u2019s ever seen\u201d (except for the late 1970\u2019s, when inflation was over 10%<\/em>); and raging crime from immigrants (violent crime has dropped 15% this year alone<\/em>). And, we also got to listen about \u201c\u2026The late and great Hannibal Lector\u201d, a fictional character who ate people. Trump implied that it is the Hannibal Lector\u2019s of Central and South America that cross our borders illegally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My final take from Trump\u2019s hour and a half speech (at least the first hour I could stand to watch) is that he wants an America of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d. It isn\u2019t about unity, it\u2019s about submission. Submit to the MAGA vision of modern America as a \u201chell-hole\u201d, and 1950\u2019s America as a \u201cparadise\u201d. Submit to the loss of freedom for all but those who match the MAGA model; no room for the migrant, or the LGBTQ, or those who aren\u2019t Christian Nationalists, or are looking for \u201cblack jobs\u201d. It\u2019s a unity of conformity, not a unity of spirit or the American Creed.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAmerica\u2019s Creed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s Acceptance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
His Will<\/h3>\n\n\n\n