Be of Good Cheer; These Polls are Temporary Phenomena
Perhaps a little anecdote will illustrate things. As I may have mentioned before, I grew up in a leftist household. Not quite as leftist as David Horowitz, perhaps, but still pretty leftist. My grandfather on my mother's side ran for Alderman in Syracuse on the socialist ticket during one of the years Eugene Debs was running. My parents subscribed to Commonweal and were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and were county coordinators for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. I worked as a (very-low level) volunteer for both McCarthy and McGovern, mostly stuffing envelopes and delivering flyers from door-to-door. I also worked as part of the "bucket brigade" at two McGovern speeches, wandering among the crowd with a KFC-style bucket, soliciting contributions. I went conservative in the 1980s, but the rest of my family has stayed fairly liberal. My dad did vote for Bush in 2000, but all my siblings remained Democrats.
At Christmas this year, my younger brother surprised me. One of our uncles (who is still a liberal) said something nasty about Bush. Mark said with amazement something along the lines of, "Well, isn't
everybody glad that Bush was president on 9-11? I sure was!" My older sister (actually she's the older of the two; I'm the eldest) looked daggers at him, as well as two of the uncles, but I managed to steer the conversation away from the subject. Christmas is a time for family harmony, not for acrimony.
Both of my sisters are in town for Easter and last night we went out for dinner. Typically I'm the one who brings up politics, but this time, my younger sister brought up the subject, asking my older sister whom she was planning on voting for. Not surprisingly, the answer was Kerry. So my younger sister went onto this tirade about how could you vote for Kerry, he's going to undermine the war on terror, I'm voting for Bush because he's the one whose going to keep my kids safe. I managed to cool things down a bit by pointing out that my older sister's state (Kansas) is solid Bush, and that if he needs her vote to win the state, he'd be losing so badly that it wouldn't matter. But my younger sister wouldn't let it die there. She begged my older sister, that if there is another terrorist attack just prior to the election (as happened in Spain) that she would consider voting for Bush to send the terrorists a message that they can't intimidate us.
I was so proud of her! Oh, and she voted for Gore in 2000!
We're going to win this thing. (Crossposted to Kerry Haters)
