“Important” can mean a couple different things, and it’s important (ahem) to know which one is at hand in any given situation. My ho-hum to presidential politics of three years ago (Red and Blue) might be taken to mean that I didn’t regard the quadrennial circus as important, but that would not be accurate. It is important, but only in ways that we can anticipate far less than the campaigners pretend we (or they, anyway) can. Aside from the sheer squirreliness of the future, a politician being put into a new position is like the pre-bagged cat you just bought: the stripes might not run the same way on the cat as on the label, but you don’t know till you get it home. When I was kid, the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards got my curiosity up and I (I was somewhat geeky) read up on what the issues were. Bottom line: Earl Warren failed in a big way to be what some people thought he would be and particularly what the president who appointed him thought he would be. That was a lesson for the future for me.

Another lesson for the future. In the summer of 1969 I (age 16) traveled across Europe and spent three and a half weeks in Greece with a group of other young people. Yes, envy me. The Vietnam War was, of course, going on. Some of us developed a version of “Onward Christian Soldiers” that mentioned napalm and sang it in the street in three or four countries. There were disturbances (we saw one) at a university in Athens. The Greek government of few restraints called it “anti-American riots” (more anti-that-Greek-government), whacked some heads, and put up thousands of American flags in honor of the moon landing.

In Rome numerous different small newspapers could be purchased just about anywhere, and we were told that we each needed to carry one to hail buses with (it worked). None of us knew Italian, but I could puzzle out enough to find the most shockingly radical left paper. There were political parties to go with all these diverse papers, and somebody told me that Italian ballots could be long and election results sometimes surprising.

But in the U.S. we have Red and Blue and anyone else really doesn’t matter, at least on the national level. We may have diverse opinions, but we don’t generally use presidential elections to express the detailed differences and have always had to go further than any public sidewalk to find published support for some of our more exotic opinions. We used to be taught in school (maybe it’s still taught?) that the “two-party system” is a good thing because — well, I don’t remember why, but it probably had something to do with marginalizing those exotic opinions.

The 1968 presidential election really brought out that supposed advantage. The idea that the U.S. should quickly quit flushing young American men down the toilet of that stupid war was still too exotic for the two-party system to include. Some of us started calling the two parties the Republicrats and the Demoblicans, or Tweedledee and Tweedledum after the argumentative twins in Through the Looking Glass. By the time either party put up a supposed “peace candidate,” it was too late for a lot more of those young men and for my comfortably stateside patience. Not much has happened since then to challenge my understanding of the two-party system.

     This post is getting too long, I’m bored with it, and I want another cup of coffee. ☕ But I should mention while what has happened in the last fifty years or so is under discussion that it seems to me now (and has for two or three decades) that the constraints of electoral politics and budgets and bureaucracies leave any president with very few options on very few issues. So while the campaigners go to great lengths to say how different the candidates are from each other, little of what is said is translatable into presidential action.

• This Chicago Tribune article from 2006 says “It’s still quite easy to remember the billboards that dotted the South in the 1960s with the common message: Impeach Earl Warren.” It didn’t have to be the South, unless that were to include Southern California, which it didn’t. The issues about Earl Warren were somewhat different in the two places.
• I had a couple friends (they were a couple) who were very right wing and anti-Communist and could find no suitable candidate in the 1976 presidential election and so voted for a candidate they knew nothing about who was running as an Independent (in California at least). His name was Gus Hall. I still laugh about that.
• John Kerry was another “peace candidate,” and some people believed it. I wished he had got elected just to show the limits of either his commitment that direction or the possibilities open to any president.