After the Fact: Campaign promises

My life is filled with controversy: should I have my oatmeal with or without the banana on top this morning? Are my Pooh pajamas still in the dryer or will I have to wear the Eeyore pj’s with the floppy ears? Coffee or tea? Chocolate, strawberry or vanilla or should I throw caution to the winds and go for Neapolitan ice cream?

Even though I’m a Republican, I campaigned ardently for John Kennedy, not because he was young and handsome (he was) or that he was Catholic (he was that, too) but, well, the other candidate was Richard Nixon. Who, if you’ll recall, got his time in the oval office after all. 

We had “class officers” even in the elementary grades. Don’t go on and on about the “first woman president” because our fourth grade class elected her and it wasn’t Hillary Clinton. I had the good sense to run for secretary: who ever heard of a boy wanting to be a secretary? And, because my handwriting was legible, I was a “shoo-in” candidate. Being secretary meant you could put words in someone else’s mouth and, provided it made them sound somewhat intelligent, there was never a dissenting vote to approve class minutes.

By the time I got to college, I’d had my fill of politics on a “personal level” and was content to play the game from the sidelines, putting up posters and going door-to-door with campaign literature. Fewer today are willing to put signs in their front yards or even show up at a caucus but they do love to protest. Give them a soap box and they’ll stand right up. More women showed up for the Women’s March than voted in the first place. As was the case with the “hanging chads” in a previous election, there were so many excuses for why votes were not counted or were counted that it was like nobody sent out invitations to the party. 

Since the Broncos weren’t playing in the Super Bowl, we didn’t bother turning on the TV and didn’t see all of those “politically motivated” commercials that were filmed months before the election, when Hillary was the front-runner in the polls. I’d have been disappointed that Budweiser didn’t air one of their classic, low-key Clydesdale commercials.  Considering how much one of those spots costs, it seems like a whole lot of money was wasted if the ambition was to sell a Coke. Or an avocado.

In the months since the election, I’ve made dozens of decisions that had no relevancy to my being affiliated with either political party, particularly inasmuch as I was relieved of the responsibility for removing a sign from my front lawn. If getting “your candidate” elected was as simple as removing the other candidates’ signs, we wouldn’t have been inundated with all of those television commercials.