I decided to put these Political Analysis posts in a single Note, just so I would be able to keep them.  I am going to do the same for the Science Fiction posts.

How about some unsolicited “Political Analysis”?  I have most of this written already, so I will just lay it on y’all every weekday morning for a while. 
POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART I: 
First, about Trump.  I am one of those people who likes to yell at blowhards on television, so being able to take potshots at Trump on Facebook is right up my alley.  Most recently, I have been calling Trump a “pussy” for being all offended by the comedians at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, so now we have to listen to a damned historian next year.  (Look it up; great fun there! 😊 ).  I typically stay away from the heavy-duty discussions though, just not really my thing. 
Despite my Southern upbringing, I have never been much of a “yes, sir”, “no, sir”, “yes, ma’am”, “no, ma’am” kind of guy.  Might even have hurt my career over the years; I’m sure not nearly so deferential as most appraisers are when they are on the witness stand.  My views on politics and many other things have changed over the years, but I have always been a big-time “Question Authority” person even before I knew it was called that.  So, the President doesn’t automatically get any respect from me – far from it.  People who have known me for a long time probably remember that I normally don’t think much of the President, whoever he is.  Obama is the only President I voted for that I liked (and practically the only one who won 😊 ), and Carter is the only President that I really liked – he actually grew on me over the years, and I am talking about while he was President, not afterward.  Carter is hands down the greatest ex-President in U. S. history – that fact is not even in dispute.  (I voted third party that year as best I can remember). 
My favorite story along these lines is the first time I voted.  I was against the 18-year-old vote, so in protest, I didn’t vote in the 1970 elections.  For 1972, Nixon had two token opponents in the Presidential Primary:  John Ashbrook from the right, and the anti-war Pete McCloskey from the left.  (I sat up all night during the tight 1968 election that Nixon won, but I had turned against him long before I went to college in August 1969.  I never would have joined the College Republicans if they were all a bunch of Nixon toadies).  Ashbrook wasn’t on the ballot in North Carolina; someone told me that I would be able to write in Ashbrook’s name though, but there was no way to do that anywhere on the mechanical voting machine as far as I could tell.  After messing around for 5 or 10 minutes, I am pretty sure that I actually said out loud:  “There is no way in hell that I am casting my first vote for Richard Nixon”, so I voted for Pete McCloskey!

Political Analysis, Part II: 
My wife Peggy liked Trump a lot, as did many of her friends, and I actually had some hope early on (yeah, for about a minute 😊 ) that he might possibly become a good President.  Although most of his speech was the usual shit (and that goes triple for his mean-spirited inauguration speech), I remember well the point in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention when he said:  “Only weeks ago in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by terrorists.  As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens.”  After the crowd roared in approval (that was at least as surprising to me as what Trump said), Trump added:  “I must say, as a Republican it’s so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”  I remember thinking that maybe Trump really could be a different kind of Republican, someone I could admire and support, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, say, or a plain-speaker like John McCain. 
When I woke up the day after the election to find out that Trump had pulled off an upset of Truman proportions, what I remember thinking, not all that unhappily, was:  “I’ll be damned, Trump actually did it!”  It didn’t take long at all for Trump to . . . I was going to say “confirm my worst fears”, but even that doesn’t begin to describe it.  On every level, Trump is a disaster as a President.  True, we are having what passes for a good economy when the Republicans are running things – but there is no comparison to how great the economy was when Clinton and LBJ were in office.  
It didn’t have to be this way.  Trump is famously all about Trump, Trump and more Trump; and the GOP was wide open for him to do anything he wanted to do with it.  There is probably no one in our lifetimes who has come into office as President with such a blank slate, or with such a believable argument that he was going to do things differently.  But he hasn’t even been able to manage simple competence – while Trump has had a few sharp women working for him (UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is/was the only person in the whole Trump administration that I like), the men have been an endless parade of dullards, and crooked dullards at that.  Any hopes that we might have had that Trump would be more of a grown-up as a President than he was as a candidate have been disintegrated; if anything, he has been a lot worse. 
Trump has cozied up to the worst elements in the Republican Party (Breitbart, etc., and whoever the Breitbart Jr. group is who just put together the doctored tape of the CNN reporter getting thrown out of the recent press briefing); he has stoked nationalist fears that weren’t even on the radar screen before he started in; and he has even said nice things about genuine Neo-Nazis. 
I have seen it demonstrated on television more than once that the people Trump really goes after (those in the press, say) are invariably African Americans, Latinos, and/or women.  Just as one example, the CNN reporter Jim Acosta whose White House credentials were recently pulled and later reinstated by court order is Hispanic.  Our Presidents are often viewed with disdain by other world leaders, but I cannot remember any of them actually being laughed at during a speech at the UN – that happened to Trump not so long ago.

Well, I really feel like a politician now; I promised you two more Political Analysis posts Monday and Tuesday, and they didn't get out. 📷:-(  But actually, this is working out pretty good.  Three more on Trump this week, and then a break when I put up a half dozen posts on Saturday about six of my favorite science fiction movies that you could call "Half Time".  Then on Monday, Part VI, what I call "Equal Time" where I talk about my early history as a Goldwater Republican that will continue through the rest of the week; including some info about me that I am ashamed of.  No, not being a Republican; much worse than that.  For you Trump supporters, please hold off on the body slams until you read Part VI.  (Bob Paxton, you think I've been trolling?  That hurts!)  A lot of the stuff next week is about Trump also; it isn't all history. 
This one is short, but not sweet:
POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART III: 
No way he could have set it up that way I guess, but the whole Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination fiasco felt to me like Trump was rubbing our noses in it.  First off, the high-minded horseshit that we should wait a full year with a Supreme Court seat unfilled until after the election that Mitch McConnell used as an excuse to deny so much as a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland suddenly didn’t matter in the case of Kavanaugh.  And there is no doubt in my mind that Kavanaugh was guilty of sexual assault exactly the way that Christine Blasey Ford laid it out.  As we learned in the news recently, Ford is still feeling the effects months later (death threats and all the rest of it), having raised $600,000+ in a GoFundMe account that she wound up using for personal protection for her family and beefed up home security – showing just how little things have changed after all since Anita Hill brought her own testimony against Clarence Thomas all those years ago. 
Besides Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony (I was in the hospital at the time for a heart cath procedure and saw it all), the account rang true as just the kind of thing that an entitled preppie like Kavanaugh would do while he was drunk on his ass.  As the cherry on the cake, we even have the spectacle of Kavanaugh’s good friend having the ironic name of Mark Judge who wrote a book in 1997 called Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk that included descriptions of Kavanaugh’s antics under the barely veiled pseudonym of “Bart O’Kavanaugh”. 
Meanwhile, Trump himself has a Cosbyesque crowd of women who have come forward with sexual assault claims against him that feel just as credible considering Trump’s idiotic statement about grabbing women by the pussy.  And Trump cavalierly dismissed the accusations against him in the same way that Kavanaugh did about Ford’s sworn testimony.

For those of you who are conversant with the Bob Dylan "protest songs", this is my "Masters of War" post.  This lying by Trump really pisses me off.  As the late President Bush stated flatly in a video that I saw the other day:  "Character matters."  You will note in all of these Political Analysis posts that I hardly talk about Trump's policies at all.  Trump won; Clinton lost; he has the right to push his agenda without a doubt.  Mostly, I am talking about other things. The final paragraph below is one that I am particularly proud of.
POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART IV: 
“No collusion” has been and continues to be Trump’s favorite phrase of his Presidency.  Maybe there was, and maybe there wasn’t – we still don’t know what Robert Mueller has come up with.  But either way, it sure wasn’t for lack of trying on Trump’s part:  Three senior members of the Trump campaign – Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner – took a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with (among others) a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.  As Wikipedia tells it:  “Veselnitskaya is a long-time lawyer for Pyotr Katsyv, who is the vice-president of the state-owned Russian Railways, and was formerly the Moscow region’s minister of transportation.” 
Also from Wikipedia:  “When the New York Times was about to report on email exchanges between [Rob] Goldstone and Trump Jr., Trump Jr. himself admitted that Goldstone had stated in an email to him that the Russian government was involved, and that the purpose of the meeting was to get ‘dirt on Clinton’, and that the meeting concerned a ‘Russian effort to aid the [Trump] campaign’.  In early July 2017, it was reported that President Donald Trump himself drafted Trump Jr.’s initial misleading statement [about the Trump Tower meeting].  The report was later confirmed by the president’s attorneys.”  Rob Goldstone is the Donald Trump buddy who set up the Trump Tower meeting.  It is quite a juicy story that is well worth looking up if you have forgotten the details.
Apparently, there was nothing to it, no dirt on Hillary Clinton after all; but of course, we have to take their word for that.  (In case you have forgotten, originally they said that the Trump Tower meeting was all about adoptions of Russian children).  And if there has been a defining characteristic of the Trump administration on truly a daily basis, it has been the lies that have been generated on an industrial scale, starting with the laughable assertion on January 21, 2017 that Trump had the largest inauguration crowd in US history that was immediately demolished by aerial photographic evidence.  There are people in the press (God bless ’em) who actually go to the trouble of fact-checking and listing the Trump administration lies; the count of those that have been conclusively proven to be lies is in the range of 5,000 now.
But of all of the Trump lies, the most colossal lie, the most stupendous lie, the most bald-faced lie, the lie with the highest possible “pants-on-fire” rating – that topper above all the toppers has got to be that the major-league control-freak Donald J. Trump did not know in advance about the Trump Tower meeting that included his own son Donald Trump Jr. and his own son-in-law Jared Kushner; this meeting that took place in Trump Tower, the building where he lived and the building where he worked.  Trump said that again in the written statements that he supplied to Robert Mueller just last month.

At some point in the Watergate scandal, it became clear that the walls were closing in, and that the end was coming.  People make fun of Trump saying "sad" all the time, but letter count matters in the Twitter world, so I get it.  But sad is only the beginning of what that felt like at the time – devastating, heartbreaking, sorrowful, contemplative . . . you can fill in the blanks.  There were a lot of opinions about Richard Nixon back in those days – always have been for that matter.  But the gloating stopped, the piling on stopped, the ridicule stopped.  This is the U.S. Presidency that we are talking about – it went way beyond just that one scandal, or that one administration.
I suspect that we are nearing that point in the Trump scandal also.  I remember thinking that the end might be coming as soon as this past week.  We don't yet know what the end might look like.  The progression of the Watergate scandal happened pretty openly; Robert Mueller is keeping his investigation fairly quiet by comparison.  Heads are going to roll, I don't think there is much doubt about that – it is already happening, from Michael Flynn on down.  The threshing might stop well short of Trump and his inner circle – or it might not.
What I would suggest is that the time has come to start turning down the fire.  I won't say that I am as guilty as the next guy, but I have been bashing away a lot, and I have been taking it too far.  Yesterday, I put up a response about the incoming Attorney General William Barr after a whole lot more that day; I was thinking he was one of the other Barr(s) that I didn't like.  When I found out that it wasn't one of them, I still made a wisecrack.  Sometime later, I thought to myself that Barr (and Trump) did not deserve that.  I spent some time last night trying to track down that response post, but I was unable to find it.
For readers of my Political Analysis posts (if there are any), there are no more body blows coming for President Trump.  Starting with Part VI, I start going through my own history as a conservative Republican.  I hadn't devoted a lot of thought to that part of my life for probably 25 years.  I have them written, edited and ready to go through Part VIII; and I have Part IX about half done.  Same with the science fiction posts – all six of those are ready to post.  Even so, taking a long enough slice of time to come up with an introductory sentence or two and to give it one last look before sending it out into cyberspace has been much more difficult than I anticipated – I have only managed to get the Political Analysis posts up through Part IV thus far.
I said when I started putting up the Political Analysis posts that I was taking a vacation from the back-and-forth responses stuff on Facebook.  I mean it this time.

We've been here before. I am particularly interested in what the academics in my would-be audience might think of this thesis, say, W Ernie Guyton, Priscilla Dodds, Alan Baragona, Sid Cundiff, George Konstantinow, and Carl Brodt. I never have read this anywhere; I just thought it up myself and have hardly ever talked about it. But it sure makes sense to me. The paragraph about Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday School is another one that I am particularly proud of.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART V:

The Trump election is not the first time that a foreign power has meddled successfully in a Presidential campaign. It might not even be the second – but I will leave the uncovering of that to others.

Jimmy Carter’s rise to the Presidency in 1976 is even more unlikely than that of Trump, and there are a lot of similarities – in the post-Watergate period, there were a host of Democratic Presidential hopefuls. The election polls were also off in 1980; Ronald Reagan wound up defeating Carter in his re-election bid in a landslide, but the polls showed a fairly close race.

I will never forget seeing an issue of a national magazine (Time I think) that gave a one- or two-page profile of the various Democrats running for President that year. The last one was Terry Sanford, the former governor of my home state of North Carolina, who was running strictly as a “favorite son” – and the next to last one was Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s success was so out of the blue that it formed part of the narrative in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone – it is quite a good novel also, and one of the better King movies – concerning the attempted rise of a truly diabolical man to the Presidency. (Just to be clear, he is not comparable at all to Trump; this character was genuinely evil and was planning to “push the button” if he got into office). In it, the protagonist, John Smith (yes, it’s true) had a horrible accident and was in a coma for 4½ years. When he finally awoke (and found himself with psychic powers – this is a Stephen King story after all), King delighted in laying out what had gone on in the world while he was out of it – Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and this peanut farmer he had never heard of who was now President.

When the Iranian hostage crisis erupted in November 1979 – almost exactly one year before election day – Carter was consumed from then on trying to get the hostages freed. Nothing worked. Carter was portrayed as ineffectual because he wasn’t able to end the crisis.

With Carter hobbled, Ted Kennedy decided that he would have one last run at the Presidency – it was an odd campaign, too; I remember seeing numerous Kennedy yard signs and placards in Raleigh that year that were the plain red and black kind that people running for City Council use. That brought about my favorite Jimmy Carter quote: “If Kennedy runs, I’ll whip his ass.” (He did, too).

The 1980 election was also the beginning of evangelical Christians as a political force in conservative American politics – and the start of their utter hypocrisy as well. Ronald Reagan was the one they backed; after all, he was pro-life and right-wing and said all of the things that they wanted to hear. But he barely made a half-hearted attempt at appearing religious; Reagan rarely even attended church services. Also, Reagan had gone through a divorce. (Yes, Virginia, being a divorcé used to be a major black mark on a man’s character – such innocent times those were.)

But Jimmy Carter was actually an evangelical Christian himself – probably the first and last genuine evangelical Christian to reach the White House to date. He never made a big thing of it, so I guess most people don’t know that Carter began teaching Sunday School from a young age and continued doing that all through his campaign, and after his term as President, and even whenever he happened to be in Plains, GA while he was President. For all I know, he is still doing that to this day even at age 94. Can you imagine going to a Sunday School class with the man who was in office as the President of the United States as the teacher? That is what Jimmy Carter did; that is how committed he is to his faith.

So, the Iranian crisis dragged on. ABC launched its late-night program Nightline while all that was going on that featured a countdown of how many days it had been since the hostages were snatched. But honestly, short of invading the place (the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba wasn’t that many years earlier then, so no one was saying we should do that), there was really nothing Carter could do but keep negotiating and just try to wait them out. There was that fun movie back in 2012 called Argo, about a daring plot to get 6 Americans freed who had managed to evade the roundup of the others. But the 52 Americans in the US Embassy that had been captured were securely held by the Ayatollah.

Ultimately, after Reagan was elected, the hostages were freed; as I remember, it didn’t take any negotiations at all – it just happened. The hostages arrived on an airplane back in the USA on Inauguration Day 1981 after 444 days in captivity. It was quite a feather in the cap of brand-new President Reagan.

I have thought a lot about the Iranian hostage crisis over the years; I was still pretty young back then, just 29 when Reagan became President, and I was a Nightline junkie, too. I doubt very much that they teach it this way in history class (you will sure never get any Republican to ever admit it), but the only scenario that makes any sense if you think about how it all went down is that Iran deliberately held onto the hostages in order to punish the United States in general and the current President in particular. The fact that the hostages came home just as Reagan was being inaugurated makes the inadvertent quid pro quo crystal clear.

If nothing else comes out of the whole Russia collusion business (see the Trump Tower meeting discussion in Part IV), I do hope that this is the end of the notion that the Republican Party scares the Communists and the terrorists and the other bad actors in the world, and that the Democrats are viewed as a bunch of wimps that they can push around. The GOP has been spouting this nonsense for decades, and there is not one single grain of truth in it. After all, Democratic President John F. Kennedy is the one who stared down Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. Collusion be damned – no one on earth disputes that Trump was the choice for President of Russian leader Vladimir Putin (who might as well be a Communist; he cut his teeth in the KGB after all). Iran doesn’t give a damn who the President is, or what party he is in – maybe they do by now, but they sure as hell didn’t in 1979.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART VI (let’s call this one “Equal Time”):
You have probably heard the term “Conservative Movement” (or someone saying that they are a “movement conservative”) over the years.  It has meant different things at different times, but our College Republican group at North Carolina State University thought of ourselves as being in the Movement.  Those were heady times, involving a major realignment of one of the two political parties that is much more dramatic than what Trump has done.  My political views have greatly changed since then, but I am not ashamed of my conservative political activism while I was in college and immediately afterward – well, mostly not ashamed anyway 😊 . 
Until Barry Goldwater became the GOP Nominee for President in 1964, frontrunners and nominees for the Republican Party nomination tended to be moderates and even borderline liberals, such as Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller (another super-rich New Yorker like Trump), George Romney (Mitt Romney’s dad), Harold Stassen, etc.  There were a few real conservatives out there, such as Robert A. Taft, who might have taken the 1952 nomination had Ike not entered the race.  Nelson Rockefeller was the odds-on pick to be the nominee in 1964.
The fledgling Conservative Movement didn’t have much money or influence, but they did have some ideas that led to the publication of several books that were printed, sold and distributed in the millions in 1963-1964 and helped launch a counter-assault to Rockefeller on behalf of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater:  A Choice Not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly; None Dare Call it Treason by John Stormer; A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley; and Barry Goldwater’s own The Conscience of a Conservative.  (Phyllis Schlafly no doubt is familiar to you; she led the successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment some years later).
Well, by God it worked, and Barry Goldwater became the Republican nominee.  I was a major fan of Goldwater in the eighth grade, and I talked him up and wore his buttons all the time.  I started wearing black-rimmed glasses like Goldwater wore back then and continued doing so even in my early years in college as I recall – although I knew fairly quickly that they didn’t really look that great on me.  (I realized, just this week, that I am wearing black-rimmed glasses again; and now I think they look pretty good! 😊 )  One of my school papers that I remember most fondly was on the upcoming 1964 election, called Who Will Win.  I even footnoted my own junior-high-school paper in a term paper that I prepared while I was in high school 😊 .
As I grew older, I began reading those 1964 books and others about conservative philosophy.  I found a stash of copies of None Dare Call it Treason in a used bookstore once, and I gave a copy of the book to everyone in my family for Christmas that year (not just that 😊 , but I included the book in each of their presents) – to the great delight of my younger sister Julie W. Kovasckitz, who still talks about it.  I inherited my parents’ copy of the book to replace the one that had washed away with Katrina.
Of course, Barry Goldwater was slaughtered in the 1964 election by Lyndon Johnson in one of the most lopsided contests ever.  His would probably have been an uphill climb in any case, but on the heels of the JFK assassination, LBJ had the election locked up from the word go.  One event late in the campaign that at least boosted the spirits of the Goldwater supporters, whether or not it actually had any effect on the election, was a well-received speech called A Time for Choosing on October 27, 1964 by a then little-known former Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan.  In short order, Reagan became the darling of the Conservative Movement.
Anyway, Goldwater carried his home state, but he also carried a band of five Southern states (Louisiana through South Carolina).  Augmented by Nixon’s “Southern strategy”, what had been the Solid South for the Democrats quickly became the Solid South for the Republicans.  Actually, nothing had really changed as to what the South wanted from their politicians:  With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that LBJ marshaled through Congress, the Republican Party rather than the Democratic Party became the party on the “right side”, insofar as the segregationists that ran the lion’s share of the power structure in the South were concerned.
This history though is a little unfair to Barry Goldwater:  He had supported all of the previous civil rights bills and acts, and correspondingly, Lyndon Johnson had opposed them all.  LBJ decided that the time had come to pursue John Kennedy’s agenda that included the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other civil rights acts to follow.  Goldwater thought that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an overreach on the part of the Federal government, so he opposed the bill.  When Goldwater talked about “states’ rights”, that is what he meant – it wasn’t just code words for preserving segregation like it was when people used that term in the South.  (Not all Republicans opposed the measure, of course; Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen was a key figure in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.) 
Another bit of history about Barry Goldwater that is even less well-known is that he had had frequent contacts with John Kennedy when it began to look like they might be facing each other in the 1964 election.  The two men were friendly with each other, even though they agreed on very little politically.  They had talked about traveling the country together and planned a long series of reasoned debates about the liberalism that Kennedy represented, and the conservatism that Goldwater represented. 
This was long before any of the corrosiveness had seeped into our politics, even though the contentiousness about civil rights, the Vietnam War, the counter-culture, and other aspects of life in the 1960’s was as real as it gets.  Had these two men actually been able to pull this off, airing these two very different political philosophies in a respectful manner, there is no telling how much sunnier our political climate might have been in the 50+ years that followed.  Alas, that was not to be; JFK was assassinated about a year before election day, and the 1964 campaign was fairly conventional.
The Goldwater campaign could have been a one-off, and the Conservative Movement might have died on the vine right afterward.  Instead, conservatives moved into the driver’s seat in the Republican Party.  While Richard Nixon again became the Republican nominee in 1968 (and won the next two Presidential elections), his campaign had a very different tone from the Richard Nixon campaign against John Kennedy in 1960, including familiar themes from Republican campaigns to come like “law and order” and “the silent majority”. 
However, segregation was clearly on its way out, and both national parties made it clear that they were not going to work to preserve it.  Alabama Governor George Wallace mounted an insurgent campaign, and he also managed to carry five Southern states as a candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968 (Arkansas instead of South Carolina, but otherwise the same as those carried by Goldwater in the previous election).  This election too involved a Kennedy assassination, this time of Robert Kennedy on the night in June 1968 when he won two Presidential primaries including California.  Incidentally, for reasons that I am not entirely clear on, Bobby Kennedy was very popular among whites and blacks alike in the South – much more so than either John or Ted.
While President Richard Nixon was a conservative and a Republican, he was not Barry Goldwater, and he was not Ronald Reagan; so I turned against him pretty quickly.  By the time Reagan was elected President in 1980 (see Part V for that story), I had left the Republican Party.  There were many reasons for this – I was so used to being on the losing side in political contests that I figured it was time to switch; that was part of it 😊 – but the rise of the “religious right” was the main factor.
Rev. Jerry Falwell, et al. had arrived on the national scene, and I didn’t like them at all; but the man who drove me out of the Republican Party was a preacher named Rev. Coy Privette, who was the most prominent spokesman for a group called the Christian Action League that led the fight against repealing the ban on what was known then as “liquor by the drink”.  City and County prohibitions on this sort of thing are common to this day in North Carolina and Mississippi alike, and in plenty of other states as well.  But this was a ban statewide – and every other state had long since taken care of the matter.
This quote from a Charlotte magazine article sums up the state of affairs at the time:  “It’s all a little hard to imagine in 2013 Charlotte, where you can’t walk half a block uptown without bumping into one or seven sidewalk signs advertising drink specials.  But 35 years ago, state law prohibited restaurants (and the handful of ‘bars’ in existence) from selling liquor.  Establishments could sell beer and wine, but patrons who wanted hard alcohol had to bring their own bottles in paper bags.  Waiters could sell ‘set ups’ of ice and mixers.  Bottles had to remain in the bag at all times, and drinkers were supposed to do all their pouring under the table.” 
I had actually forgotten that last part, but in the few instances when I was with someone who was “brown-bagging”, they kept their bottle under the table and brought it up to do the pouring.  For me, I thought it was an issue of being civilized.  I remember telling a lot of people in that era that I might not ever order a drink in a restaurant (I was perfectly fine with drinking beer and wine with meals then) – but I ought to be able to know when I go to a restaurant or bar that it was an option if I wanted one. 
Naturally, the libertarians I knew were all for ending the ban; and just about all of the other conservatives were drinkers, so if they wanted to keep out liquor by the drink, I don’t remember them ever talking about it.  I didn’t even think of it as a liberal issue or a conservative issue; it was just stupid.  It was a long and contentious fight until finally, there was a successful referendum that passed statewide in 1978.
Before that though, our conservative friends in the leadership of the North Carolina Republican Party (whose statewide office was pretty close to the NCSU campus as I remember) started talking up Coy Privette as a gubernatorial candidate.  I couldn’t believe it, and I was pretty vocal in my opposition.  People tried to tell me that he was the best conservative candidate now that Jim Gardner’s star was fading, but I wasn’t buying it.  I didn’t see anything at all conservative in keeping people from having a drink with dinner, and the other stuff Privette was saying didn’t sound like what I believed in either. 
Coy Privette was on the primary ballot but lost the 1976 Republican nomination to David Flaherty, who in turn lost to popular Democratic Governor Jim Hunt.  Hunt was Governor of the state multiple times and, according to Wikipedia:  “Hunt is tied for the fourth-longest gubernatorial tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history at 5,838 days [16 years].”  By the end of 1976, I was no longer a registered Republican.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART VII:
When I arrived at North Carolina State University in August 1969, I thought I understood what the Conservative Movement was all about based on the books and magazines and newspapers that I was reading.  I think that I had already discovered the Human Events newspaper by then.  Well, once I joined the College Republicans, it turned out to be a much bigger world than I knew about.  While there were Nixon supporters among the general membership, the leaders in the club thought of Nixon pretty much the way I did:  that he was a moderate (or worse) who was “selling us out”.  There were a lot of past members of the College Republicans who were hanging around as well, and also other CR clubs at nearby Duke University and the University of North Carolina.
I won’t bore you with all of the details, but there was a very lively mix of competing philosophies among the College Republicans.  College days are the best time for that, and I dare say that most people who have been to college have had that experience even if they weren’t political.  Besides the “traditionalist” conservatives like me of the Goldwater and Reagan variety, there was a spectrum of libertarians that included fairly moderate libertarians (if there is such a thing 😊 ), rock-ribbed “Randist” followers of Ayn Rand and other figures in that movement whose names escape me, and even a few who espoused what was nearly an anarchist philosophy (though not of the bomb-throwing type that most people know about), who talked about setting up private highways and private armies and even private lighthouses.  There were one or two people who were edging toward Neo-Nazism, and some who called themselves “monarchists” and I guess wanted the US to rejoin the British Commonwealth.
Late-night bull sessions and debates were the order of the day, and they were heavily lubricated with beer.  I didn’t start drinking myself until after I graduated, but just about everyone else was.  (Looking back, I guess that I was against the 18-year-old drinking age as well as the 18-year-old vote 😊 ).  As a result of being involved in those gatherings over so many years, on top of having my own political philosophy change a few times since then, I have very little patience with politicians and commentators of whatever stripe who are strictly toeing the party line.  I need to hear something unexpected or even daring from time to time from these people.
As a former “Hollywood liberal”, Ronald Reagan was a convert and a “real conservative” who was like that occasionally as a President, though I cannot call to mind anything specific.  However, George H. W. Bush (who passed away a few weeks ago) was the son of moderate Senator Prescott Bush and was viewed as a moderate himself in his early political career.  When he succeeded Reagan as President in 1988, he didn’t always seem to know what positions to take in the by-then strongly conservative political environment; and I noticed that he pretty much went with the hard-right position every time. 
The same could be said of his son George W. Bush, who became President in 2000; although to be fair, the political positions that “Bush 43” embraced felt more genuine than had been the case with his father.  Also, George W. Bush threw us a curve ball during his Presidency:  He launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history; and it was mainly aimed at the area where the disease truly raged, sub-Saharan Africa.  By contrast, Reagan never so much as uttered the word “AIDS” during his term in office.
And now we have Donald Trump.  I lived in New York City from very early in 1990 through the early spring of 1994, and Trump was a celebrity Manhattan businessman who was on the news regularly.  Politically, “the City” is probably the most liberal city in the country, and the section where I lived (the West Village) is one of the most liberal sections of that city.  My Congressman when I moved there was an old-style, hardline liberal named Ted Weiss; I had not known until I saw it just now that his predecessor in Congress was Democratic firebrand Bella Abzug.
Following Weiss’s death in 1992, he was succeeded by Jerrold Nadler, and he was my Congressman for the rest of my time in the City.  I hadn’t thought much about him lately, until I began seeing Nadler on the news recently (and noticed that he had lost a lot of weight from when I knew him).  As the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, he would likely be in charge of any hearings about Donald Trump that might come about after the 40-seat Congressional gains by the Democratic Party take effect in 2019.  From what I can tell, he is being thoughtful about the whole thing, and I am happy to see that.  By the way, I am just as proud that my representative in Congress while I was living in San Francisco was Nancy Pelosi.  Yeah, that is what I said:  proud! 😊
Anyway, that is the political climate in New York City.  In the business world though, the City is highly traditional; I dare say that even “casual Friday” remains a tough sell in most offices there.  I started my New York career working for a major accounting firm; our section was later spun off as a separate company, though I was still in the office with all of the accountants (that was true when I transferred to San Francisco as well).  The policy in the New York office was to have casual Fridays on the last Friday of the month (casual wear was also fine if you came in on the weekend or at night), and I remember being so ticked off if I happened to be away from the office on that day, since I would have to wait an entire month before casual Friday would roll around again. 
On the other hand, what business leaders care about in New York is that you do your job.  Period.  Your politics, your friends, your personal life, your sexual orientation, how you spend your leisure time, what you use as entertainment while you are working at your desk – none of that is ever an issue until it starts interfering with your work.  One man that I worked with had Rush Limbaugh on all morning not long after he arrived on the scene, and others had a variety of radio stations playing.
Thankfully, I was told by the sales staff at our local department stores in Raleigh that I needed gray suits and formal ties if I was going to move to New York City – that really none of the suits that I had been wearing in North Carolina would work there.  By the way, by “gray”, I don’t mean the light gray suits that are fairly common in the South – these are charcoal gray suits that I am talking about, and they are just this side of black. 
In other words, Donald Trump and I dressed the same way while I was living in New York City, and the suits and ties that he is wearing now are basically indistinguishable from what he was wearing when I saw him on the news back in the day (though I did notice that he wore a navy blue suit the other day).  I remember thinking at the time that that was pretty cool; everyone that I saw during the day and at work was also dressed like that, but this was a guy who was on TV all the time.
The accounting firm that I worked for (Pannell Kerr Forster) specialized in the hospitality industry (basically hotels and restaurants), and Trump was also in that line of work.  I used to wonder how I would react if Trump called up and said, how’d you like to work for me.  Actually, there was never any chance of that.  All of the major real estate dynasties in New York City were closely held family businesses like the Trump Organization, and I imagine that this is still the case.
When I transferred to San Francisco in 1994, the relentless pressure-cooker business world in New York was just starting to get to me.  I once told my boss in New York that there is an energy in the air in the City that you can feel, and he told me, “I can feel it at the airport.”  My new home was a serious big-city environment also, but the stress level was several orders of magnitude lower.  In the San Francisco office, they recommended the Men’s Wearhouse as the place to buy my suits, and casual wear was fine for the entire summer.
I cannot really recall what the politics of Donald Trump were while I was living in New York.  I guess the short answer is that he didn’t say that much about it.  I remember thinking that he was pro-choice and probably a moderate liberal, but maybe that was just because those were my own beliefs.  In any case, I don’t think I am going to raise any eyebrows when I say that Trump doesn’t seem to be an authentic conservative; and like George H. W. Bush, he seems to go with the hard-right positions just to be safe.
Trump though takes it a whole lot further than Bush ever did.  I remember watching Real Time with Bill Maher one time fairly early in his term, where Bill Maher talked about Trump.  He first gave an example of a Trump move to eliminate the ban on lead bullets, because if bald eagles eat them from a carcass that a hunter had killed, they will die.  Removing the ban serves no conservative principle, adds no jobs, saves no one money.  So why was it done?  
This would be a good time to address that term “politically incorrect” that Trump’s supporters love to bandy about, since that is what Bill Maher’s show was originally called.  The Politically Incorrect show had that name I imagine because the discussions often brought up controversial topics, and the conversations had a pungent mix.  In Trump’s case, saying you are “politically incorrect” only means that you are acting like an asshole. 
Or, I don’t know; maybe I am wrong about that.  Here is the way that Bill Maher discussed the lead bullet proposal on his show; maybe he is being an asshole also? 😊  “Because when a sportsman experiences the exquisite joy of blowing the head off a chipmunk or wolf and leaves it to rot, bald eagles eat the carcass; and when it has lead in it, it poisons them to death slowly and painfully.  If it doesn’t have lead, eagles – you know, the symbol of our f**king country, before they were replaced by a trucker hat – they don’t die.  Why not leave that rule alone?  Because hunting is a sacred sport?  Is it even really a sport?  Is it a sport if one team doesn’t know the game is going on?”
And Maher concluded:  “It’s just about some warped idea that the way to show strength is by being a dick.  And that in a nutshell is what Republicanism has become.  Looking at any problem and saying, ‘what would a dick do?’”  Maher went on to give another dozen examples at least of something that Trump had done or talked about doing, where he was “being a dick”; I didn’t think he was ever going to run out of them. 
As an aside, people love to dump on Bill Maher because he is an open and ardent atheist.  I remember once watching The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert interviewed George Will.  Will was one of the first stridently conservative commentators on the Sunday talk shows and elsewhere; anyway, he mentioned in the interview that he was basically an atheist.  I think Colbert was as surprised as I was to hear him say that; Colbert was not at all trying to draw that out of him, George Will just said that on his own.  Like it or not, folks, they are out there.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART VIII:

Returning to my political hero to this day, Barry Goldwater was one man who could always be counted on to bluntly tell the truth, often with a generous dose of salty language; and with all of the changes in the way that I view the world, I never lost my affection for him. You know who else was an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater in her younger days? Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Some years after his Presidential loss, Goldwater returned to the Senate and eventually became an elder statesman who was universally respected and admired from coast to coast. Remarkably and incredibly, Barry Goldwater accomplished this not by mellowing or by polishing his image, but by being the same way he had always been. Goldwater truly had one of the most colorful careers in the history of modern American politics. I just scanned a long obituary online that brought it all back for me.

Barry Goldwater split with the GOP establishment on many major issues: He supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, called for an end to discrimination generally against gays and lesbians, strongly decried the rise of the religious right within the Republican Party, took a pro-choice position on abortion, and denounced calls to restore organized school prayer in schools as an unwarranted intrusion by Government into private lives.

Many leaders in today’s GOP have tut-tutted about these positions and have said that Barry Goldwater would be viewed as a moderate these days. A lot of people who really should have known better didn’t know what to make of this either; a feature article on washingtonpost.com from 1994 is entitled “Barry Goldwater’s Left Turn”.

I found a post on a website called BlueNC.com – which describes itself as “an independent website committed to progressive politics in North Carolina” – that talks about this and gathered some quotes from Goldwater about gay rights, the religious right, and other topics. In the introductory material, the post says: “Nicknamed ‘Mr. Conservative’, [Barry Goldwater] represents what the Republican Party should have been before selling out to the Religious Right – a party dedicated to small constitutional government, equal opportunity for all, free markets, and individual liberty.” If that isn’t a definition of “conservatism”, I don’t know what is – that is sure as hell what it means to me. Yet the Republican Party has strayed far from this arena in recent decades.

You want some quotes (courtesy of this post on BlueNC.com)? I don’t know how I can talk about Barry Goldwater without listing some. I won’t go so far as to say that these quotes and others like them are unique, but I cannot think of a single person on the political landscape during my lifetime who spoke this way even occasionally. This is how Goldwater talked about everything, not just these subjects.

“Mark my words, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”

“I think every good Christian ought to kick [Jerry] Falwell right in the ass.” (after Falwell opposed the 1981 nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, saying “Every good Christian should be concerned”).

“The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay. You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it.”

“Gays and lesbians are a part of every American family. They should not be shortchanged in their efforts to better their lives and serve their communities. As President Clinton likes to say, ‘If you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded’ and not with a pink slip just for being gay.”

“The oldest philosophy in the world is conservatism, and I go clear back to the first Greeks. . . . When you say ‘radical right’ today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.”

When a lot of Southern politicians announce that they are switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, they often puff themselves up and say something like: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” And that is how I feel about it also: I didn’t leave the Conservative Movement, the Movement left me. If the Republican Party still believed in the principles that Barry Goldwater espoused, I would probably have been a Republican all along, and to this day.

Not long after I arrived in college (probably in late 1969), I saw an article that one of my friends had taped to his dorm room wall entitled “Barry Bombs Away” that was a wide-ranging interview where Barry Goldwater talked about the legalization of marijuana, getting the hell out of Vietnam (his words), and other bombshell ideas. I was shocked at the time but eventually realized that he was right in basically everything that he said.

Barry Goldwater also talked in that interview about Harry Truman, how he always told it like it is, and how he was probably one of our greatest Presidents. Mind you, this was one of the most prominent Republicans in the country praising a Democratic President. Hardly anyone thought that about Truman back then, but it is the consensus opinion about him now. Harry Truman was the President who had the legendary sign on his desk that said: “The Buck Stops Here”.

John McCain had the same kind of maverick spirit as Barry Goldwater, and I was always a fan. How could you help it? The 2008 Presidential election is the first one in my lifetime where I would have been happy either way, whether Barack Obama won, or whether John McCain won – ordinarily, I would NOT have been happy no matter who won 😊 . Now that John McCain has passed, the other Arizonan Jeff Flake is the only Republican Senator who seems to have any balls at all. There are Democrats from Arizona that I also think a lot of, especially Gabrielle Giffords (she is a hero in my book), but also Stewart Udall, Mo Udall, and Janet Napolitano.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART IX:

Anytime a national election appeared on the horizon, we in the College Republicans would get each other all worked up with fears that “this could be our last free election” if so-and-so isn’t elected President. Even though we didn’t think much of Richard Nixon, at least he wasn’t Hubert Humphrey (Nixon defeated him in the 1968 election) or George McGovern (Nixon defeated him in the 1972 election).

By the time 1976 rolled around, Nixon had resigned, and Vice President Gerald Ford had ascended to the Presidency. I was drifting away from the Republican Party at that time, and even though I liked Ford, kind of, Jimmy Carter didn’t scare me at all. I began to think that the whole “this could be our last free election” thing was kind of silly.

By the late 1980’s, real estate appraisers like me had sophisticated computer software available that helped us value complicated properties. We would make 10-year projections routinely if doing so made sense; I remembered how the year 2000 marched up the list of years until all of the years started with “20”. The republic seemed to be safe from whatever politicians were running it, and our future seemed to be secure.

Anyway, I had seen Gerald Ford when he appeared at a 1966 rally for Republican Congressional candidate Fred Steele in 1966 while I was in high school – I believe that he was the Minority Leader of the House at that time – and I got his autograph on one of Steele’s pamphlets, consciously or unconsciously, so that the signature could be dated. I guess that I have always thought like a collector; when I went to college, Mom had a stamp pad that she used to start applying my name to the front covers of my record albums. I reacted with horror with how it looked after awhile and made her stop; if I lost some of my albums, so be it, but I didn’t want them to be defaced.

Until I looked it up just now, I had thought that the Fred Steele / Gerald Ford rally happened a lot later; at this point (1966), I was in the Teenage Republicans. I remember that rally very well, although otherwise, I don’t recall too much about my years as a “TAR”. One of the members of the club was a high school friend named Karen Nielsen. She was in the Miss Winston-Salem pageant around that time (I haven’t been able to pin down the exact date); and because of that, and also because there was a rock band who would perform there that I had heard of called the Royal Guardsmen (of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” fame), I decided to go to my first and last beauty pageant, where Karen was named Miss Congeniality.

I have written about the concert appearance by the Royal Guardsmen in one of my Under Appreciated Rock Band posts – that is where my real passion lies. It can be found on my now fully indexed website: https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockbands/home (shameless plug! 😊 ).

Another thing I remember about being a Teenage Republican is that the 1966 Congressional Elections represented a banner year for the Republican Party – just two years after Lyndon Johnson had defeated Barry Goldwater so handily. I felt vindicated by the news, and I went to the trouble of looking up every Republican member of Congress who had won election that year – I am pretty sure that it was all of them, not just the new ones.

Over the course of my life, I have often started a variety of projects that ballooned into something much more massive than what I had envisioned. Creating, linking and indexing 10,000 webpages in my website – imagine what that was like! Usually I just keep it up no matter what, until I run out of money or just get completely overwhelmed.

When my Mom showed me how to use her Royal typewriter (I was probably 8 or 9 years old at the time), I was having such a good time typing (two fingers at that time) that I decided to type up the telephone book! I never went that far, but I did type up the listings for the small town of King that were given in a separate section; about all I remember is that many of those people were living in a place called Tobaccoville, which struck me as being a funny name for a town. Mom loved to tell this story about me and then add that we didn’t know anybody who lived in King! Many years later, in 1986, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company constructed its largest cigarette manufacturing plant in Tobaccoville, containing 2 million square feet.

Anyway, there was no Internet then of course, so I guess I went to the library and found the information somehow. I created little freehand tables listing the Republicans in Congress that won in 1966 by state (and probably with the states listed alphabetically – that sounds like me! 😊 ), and I am pretty sure that I provided their opponents in the races and the percentage vote totals. By the time I was through, I had pages and pages of information. And I didn’t have any idea what to do with them. 😊 Maybe I was able to get credit in my social studies class somehow, but I kind of doubt it. My best recollection is that I showed them to my one of my favorite members of the high school faculty, math teacher Linda Farrar; and she asked me if she could keep them. Copying machines were pretty primitive in those days also, so I guess I didn’t even keep a copy for myself.

Watergate was a major betrayal of trust exhibited by our nation’s leaders, and there have been several more since then. While I don’t think they said this publicly very much, I heard Republican operatives talk about how the parties spied on each other all the time, and that this was no big deal. I swallowed it a little back then, but definitely not now.

The idea that Russia, of all nations, might be attempting to sway the 2016 Presidential election – and actually had developed the technology and the skills to have a shot at making that happen – was terrifying to me. From the beginning, Trump has taken the idea that someone ought to look into this as a personal affront. I never really understood that; as far as I know, no one was saying that Trump had somehow stolen the election – and after all, no matter what someone thought they had proved or demonstrated about collusion or anything else, who is going to be able to apply that to how the votes were cast in X county in Y state? There is sure not going to be a do-over. At some point, I said in a Facebook post that I wished that there was no talk at all about any collusion, so that Trump would take this more seriously.

I will say this though: I have mentioned before that there never seems to be any accountability in this country for the people at the top. After Nixon resigned, Ford immediately pardoned him of any and all Watergate-related crimes; while I can see the logic in that, to help the country heal and all of that, the result is that Nixon went back home from the White House with little more than hurt feelings.

Here is what happened another time, with regard to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, their first prime minister: “On 12 June 1975, the Allahabad High Court declared Indira Gandhi’s election to the Lok Sabha in 1971 void on grounds of electoral malpractice. In an election petition filed by her 1971 opponent, Raj Narain (who later on defeated her in 1977 parliamentary election from Raebareli), alleged several major as well as minor instances of using government resources for campaigning. The court ordered her stripped of her parliamentary seat and banned from running for any office for six years. According to constitution, the Prime Minister must be a member of either the Lok Sabha (the lower house in the Parliament of India) or a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house). Thus, this decision effectively removed her from office.”

The story is a little more complicated than how I remembered it; Indira Gandhi refused to resign, even though she had no standing to be prime minister, but she later lost the 1977 elections.

Anyway, Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency on August 8, 1974 – when impeachment was on his doorstep – was unprecedented. Not only had that never happened before, I doubt that there was even anything in the Constitution or in Federal law to cover something like that. I remember news broadcasts at that time where reporters talked about driving by the White House and the Capitol on the day when the Presidency passed from Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford. It was just an ordinary day: no riots in the streets, no protestors demanding this or that, no barricades at the gates (that would come later of course following concerns about possible terrorist attacks on major governmental buildings). Reporters who had had assignments overseas marveled at how unlikely this would be in nearly any other country – that some amount of tension would surely be present, and how it might have been a whole lot worse.

Then there was the rollercoaster ride during the 2000 election, where George W. Bush was eventually declared the winner. While there was and continues to be a fair amount of grumbling about the whole thing, the decision was reluctantly but graciously accepted by Al Gore and his supporters. This is one of several elections recently where the electoral vote and the popular vote were at odds. It was probably my high school paper on the 1964 election and the upcoming 1968 election where I talked about this – I forget the name of that one; it was something boring like The Republican Party: 1960-1968, unlike the catchier Who Will Win scrawled across a simple map of the states that I used in junior high school.

The idea is that the electoral vote allows a close election to look like more of a mandate than using the popular vote. I looked back over the Presidential elections going all the way back, and there had only been a handful of times where the popular vote was won by one nominee, and the electoral vote was won by a different nominee.

Also, with respect to the popular vote, there have also been several elections recently where no one got a majority; if that happened in a Senate race or an election for Governor, there would usually be a runoff. No one wants to see that on the Presidential level.

Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election, and if he had carried his home state of Tennessee, we would not be talking about that election so much. Not for the first (or last) time, Florida was the key state; and actually, all of the major networks had awarded the state of Florida to Gore early on based on exit polls. In summary, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, 48.4% to 47.9%; and George W. Bush narrowly won the electoral value, 271 to 266 – but only because the famous Supreme Court case of Bush vs. Gore halted the recount in Florida on December 12, 2000, just over one month after election day.

The official voting margin in Florida was just 537 votes, or 0.009%. However, voting recounts were still in progress in several heavily Democratic counties before the 5–4 Supreme Court decision. And you no doubt remember the “butterfly ballots” and “hanging chads” that both complicated the Florida recount and cast doubt on the results.

Here is something that I hadn’t known (or at least remembered): One of the third parties in 2000 was the Reform Party, with Pat Buchanan being the nominee; and one of the other candidates for that nomination was Donald Trump. Buchanan himself weighed in on the butterfly ballot controversy by saying that his vote totals where those ballots were used had been much higher than he could really believe were votes that had been intended for him. There was controversy about the Florida ballots in the 2018 Elections also, where in some areas, the section listing the candidates for the Senate race was buried after the voting instructions, where many voters evidently overlooked casting a vote in that race.

The personalities involved made the 2000 Election look like something that had happened in a “banana republic” rather than the United States. The Governor of Florida at that time, Jeb Bush was the brother of the man who won the disputed recount, George W. Bush. Also, Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State of Florida, who was in charge of running the election machinery, was also the head of the Bush campaign in Florida. This is the first time in my memory where a State Secretary of State had an overt political role, but it certainly hasn’t been the last. In the contentious Georgia Gubernatorial Election of 2018, where a lawsuit is pending, the sitting Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp was running as the Republican Nominee for Governor.

While I am still not really worried that the next election might be the last free election or something, I do wonder how a Presidential resignation and the Supreme Court decision like the one in the 2000 Election would be viewed in today’s political climate. Somehow I don’t think it would go down nearly so smoothly as occurred in 1974 and in 2000.