Voters in a Mood: Saturday Political Soapbox 127

That's me in the corner, reading my religion, President of the Junior Class.  Then there's John Wilson, Vice-President; Brenda Sanderson, Secretary (later our Homecoming Queen) and Melody Austin, Treasurer.  Three beautiful, intelligent young people, and some doofus wearing a tie and reading the help wanted ads.

Yep,

I was our Junior Class President, at good old Bridgeport High School.

Little did I know that it would be the very pinnacle of my political career and everything would be downhill from there.

As you can imagine, I was a strange duck running.  I campaigned, put up posters. passed out little cards people could wear with a "Strait pin", had a platform, gave impassioned AND substantive speeches, organized a political party and slate of candidates to run with, even did polling. I was admittedly quirky but also very dedicated to what I wanted to do.  

Of course, note every student saw it that way.  

I was running against one of the most popular boys in the school.  He was all A's AND athletic.  The other athletic guys followed his lead.

One time, in a hallway near the gym, this guy, James Wilbur, saw me by myself, with my campaign materials.  He was with his athletic buddies.  He asked me, "Why are you running?"  I gave him a long, spirited answer, filled with facts and detailed solutions,  I was at my rhetorical best.

When I was finished, he just looked at me and said. "Strait, you're crazy!"  All his buddies yelped their agreement, thumping Wilbur heartily on the back.  They left me standing there, by myself, drained, alone, feeling like I had made an utter fool of myself.

Nevertheless, I won.  Many of the popular kids that were dominant in the class decided to back me instead of Wilbur.  To this day, I'm not sure why.  Maybe they just wanted to bring the occasionally arrogant James Wilbur down a peg.  Or maybe it was just the free Strait pins.  Who knows?

My administration was what you would expect.  Lofty ambitions that either got ignored or done by somebody else.  I gradually figured out that the "popular kids who ran things" were indeed the popular kids that ran things.   They would listen to me a bit, and then go off and do what they wanted.

Because I failed to live up to my platform (specifically I promised I would raise $1500 and I fell short of that), I did not run for Senior Class President.  I probably would have gotten my posterior kicked in anyways.

They instead turned to someone who was sort of the antithesis of who should be representing the class.  They elected a burnout as kind of an act of defiance.

It turned out as disastrous as you might expect.  The Senior Treasurer, Dona Bow (who is now one of my bestest friends) discovered missing funds from a magazine subscription fundraiser the class had put on.  I don't know the exact amount, but I believe it was at least several hundred dollars.   I can't remember the extent of the legal trouble he got into, but the whole thing was not pretty.

But what could you do?  The voters were in a mood, a really self-destructive mood, and the election of someone like that kid was inevitable.

Voters sometimes do that.  They elect people they know are not worthy, simply because they are in kind of an "eff you" mood.  I saw that in 1972 when people would tell me they KNEW that George McGovern was the better person, and they KNEW that Nixon was a crook, but well, "eff you!"  In 1980 I knew there was no substance to Reagan, that he was an empty suit echoing far-right-wing talking points, that he was too extreme to be elected, but you know what?  The voters decided to say, "eff you!"  And we have been trying to recover from Reaganomics and trickle-down B.S. ever since.

And now we are getting ready to experience the biggest "eff you" in American political history.  A cadre of voters have taken advantage of the jumbled mess in the Republican Party, and are about to foist into nomination the most unsuitable presidential candidate I have ever seen. Trump is more racist, given our times, than George Wallace.  He is more unstable than Ross Perot, more misogynist and sexist and all-around horndoggy than Clinton or Kennedy, less intelligent and articulate than Bush, Jr., more militarily and foreign policy ignorant than ANY candidate we've ever had.

And YET, he is about a five to one favorite to be the Republican nominee, and like it or not, about even money that he could actually be the next President of the United States.

Why?

Because the voters are in a mood.  An irrational, hateful, defiant, brutal, "eff you" mood.  And the Democrats seem to be determined to nominate someone that it will be easy-peasy for Trump to run against, someone who represents the very essence of the "special interest -  Citizens United"  system that voters are rebelling against.

Let's hope that the voters got out of their "eff you" mood by the first Tuesday in November.

I fear greatly that they won't.  And it makes me tremble and pray for our country and our world.

Because there is a lot more than magazine subscriptions at stake.