For Halloween way back in the fall of 1960, my mother created a costume for me called a "Crazy Mixed-Up Voting Machine" which consisted of a big cardboard box with a hole in the top for my head, plastered on all sides with pictures from magazines of both Kennedy and Nixon. I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debates on tv. After the election, I used to come home from school and actually watch Kennedy's press conferences - pretty unusual for a ten-year-old.
My parents weren't politically active, but they were Democrats. They never discussed politics, at least not in front of us kids, but they always pulled the lever for the "D" candidate. So I grew up a slightly left-leaning child, and when I went to college, thanks to the political climate of the 1960s, I leaned left even more. After college, I lived in a forced-union state, and worked in unionized school systems, which are even more left-leaning. Looking back, I have voted for some pretty stinky candidates over the years, simply because they were Democrats. Like many others, I suppose, I voted with my co-workers and family, mirroring their political beliefs. I'm very glad some of those horrible hopefuls lost their elections. I'm not very proud of my blind support of those Democrats. I think I was just lazy politically, letting the union 'suggest' which candidate deserved my vote.
I've been out of the union now for about 6 years, and my husband and I are small business owners. It sure gives a person a different perspective. As the 2008 elections approached, I was ambivalent about how I would vote. I decided to read each candidate's book to give me some insight into Obama and McCain that would help me decide who to vote for.
In McCain's book, "Faith of My Fathers" I learned about the purposely broken bones and brutal beatings he endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese, and how he stood up to his captors for five and a half long years. I finished that book and thought, "What a patriot." Then I read "Dreams From My Father" by Obama. In that book, I learned of Obama's somewhat unusual childhood and priviledged upbringing - a muslim school in Indonesia, a private school in Hawaii, expensive Ivy League colleges, his choice of friends (by his own admission in the book, he always sought out the Marxist professors, the structural feminists, and more radical black and/or foreign students) and his job choice - to be a community organizer - basically a paid rabble-rouser. As I finished it, I remember saying to myself, "This guy is a Socialist!.....A guy who is running for President of the United States of America as a Democrat is a Socialist.....how can this be?" That is when I started questioning my many years of voting with the Ds.
After the 2008 election, I watched as the Democrats shut out the Republicans in Congress every chance they got. The forcing of Obamacare against the obvious will of the American people was the last straw. At the same time, the Tea Party started taking shape in my area. Curious, I went to a few of their meetings. I found them to be sensible people who yearned for their country to 'get back to the basics' - follow the constitution. They were anti-bank bailout, anti-stimulus, and for common sense values - smaller government, self-reliance, and all those other American values I grew up with. I had found a home. At Tea Party meetings, I also found other disaffected former Democrats, as well as some former Republicans, who were tired of their party slowly moving to the left, toward more social programs, away from fiscal responsibility and other core Republican values.
Now, as I watch the group of thugs in the 'Occupy Wall Street' mob (backed by labor unions and the Communist Party USA, with the tacit approval of President Obama), listen to leftists like Stephen Lerner discuss how to terrorize Washington DC, and see the hate spewing forth from Democrat Party faithfuls like Roseanne Barr, Michael Moore, Morgan Freeman, Janeane Garafalo, Alec Baldwin and other Hollywood 'celebrities' directed toward the Tea Party and other Americans, simply because they don't agree with them, I realize that the Democrat Party has slid dangerously far to the radical left. Today, John F. Kennedy would not recognize his party. As Ronald Reagan said in 1962, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party. The party left me."
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