Politics of my Life – Part II

The years I was busy raising kids, 1977

I loathed “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The war and draft continued to ramp up. Despite his proclamation that “I am not a crook,” he was. In 1972, the Democratic slate of Senator George McGovern and Sargent Shriver lost in a landslide to Nixon and fellow crook Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign in 1973 due to corruption and taking cash bribes in the White House. Thankfully, Agnew was replaced by Gerald Ford, so when Nixon was forced to resign (remember Watergate?) on August 8, 1974, we had a decent man as president.

My hatred for Nixon ran deep, but I was also a new mom during those years. My first child was born in 1971 and my second child was born three months after Nixon resigned. When Jon was a baby, my brother taught him to bang on the TV screen whenever Nixon appeared and say, “Bad, bad man.” I was thoroughly disgusted with politics and largely disengaged. Ford finished Nixon’s term but I was raising two preschoolers and had a baby by the end of his presidency, so all I remember about him was Chevy Chase’s cruel but hilarious impression on SNL which made fun of him falling down.  

Ford tripping Chevy Chase (at least he had a sense of humor)

In 1976, like most Americans, I wanted to turn the page from Nixon’s (and by extension Ford’s) corrupt presidency, although I did admire Betty Ford for her honesty about her addiction. So, when a peanut farmer and governor of Georgia seemingly came out of nowhere to win the Democratic nomination, I was all in. Carter was probably the most ethical, decent president of my lifetime. His son Jack and grandchildren Jason and Sarah lived around the block from us, and our daughter Dana knew Jason from Lincoln School through Duke University.

President Carter at Lincoln School

Unfortunately, decency only went so far. We had long gas lines, high energy costs (I remember wearing sweaters to keep our home cooler so we could save on energy costs), and the Iranian hostages. When Carter ran again, we weren’t going to vote for Ronald Reagan, but for some reason I can’t remember, I threw my vote away, voting for John Anderson, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who ran as a plain-spoken independent candidate mostly supported by liberals and college students.

Of course, Reagan won in a landslide so my senseless protest didn’t really matter. He was a former performer, former Democrat, survivor of an assassination attempt, and, until recently, the oldest president to be inaugurated at age 69, who developed dementia near the end of his second term. While Biden was 78 when he assumed the presidency, the rest of Reagan’s profile is closer to Trump’s, who was actually slightly older than Biden when he became president for the second time. More thoughts about old presidents when I enter the Trump II era.

The Reagan era was eight years of conservative policy, Reaganomics, the war on drugs (remember Nancy’s “Just Say No” campaign?), an escalation of the arms race, increased military spending, invading Grenada, being slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic, bombing Libya, and the Iran-Contra scandal. One of the most hateful things Reagan did in his defeat of Carter and Mondale in 1980 was using the “welfare queen” stereotype of a poor black woman who cheated the system to steal tax payers’ money. The only positive thing I remember about Reagan was him telling Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” uniting East and West Berlin. Aside from that, I disliked everything Reagan represented, but I had three kids who grew into teens during that era, and my energy was devoted to local issues affecting their educations. Those were my PTA president days.

When George H.W. Bush ran to succeed Reagan after being his vice president, the Democrats once again nominated a sure-loser, the hapless Michael Dukakis, and Bush won in a landslide. I remember the Willie Horton ads Bush ran in his campaign about a black convicted felon from Massachusetts who raped a woman while on a prison furlough, a program Dukakis supported as governor. Fear and scapegoating people of color always seem to win for the Republicans.

On a personal level I have several memories of Bush I. Our son graduated high school at the beginning of Bush’s term. Jon wore an armband protesting the killing of demonstrators on June 3-4 in China's Tiananmen Square. Right after graduation, we flew to Washington, D.C, because Jon had been selected to be a Presidential Scholar. There was a ceremony in the non-paved Rose Garden at which President Bush spoke. Barbara Bush attended the whole program and seemed very pleasant. We even hung out at the White House. This whole experience was surreal for lifelong Democrats who leaned left.

Us in the White House!

In 1990, the nursery school I directed was engaged in a series of dialogues with the new minister who wanted to make substantial changes to the school, making it “faith based.” My children had attended this school which had been non-sectarian for its entire existence and had a sizable Jewish population. Our last dialogue was scheduled for the evening of August 2, 1990, the night President Bush decided to attack Iraq. In that era, the only way to follow the war news was to stay home and watch television. When no one showed up for the meeting, the minister declared no one really cared about the new, religious direction of the school. By January 1992, I gave up negotiating and announced my resignation, effective at the end of the school year.  Right after I tendered my letter of resignation, most of the members of the nursery school board resigned, followed by the resignation of the entire teaching staff. We had a school and a board but no place to put it.  No problem, I thought, let’s start our own school. Thus, I don’t really remember much about the Bush presidency other than the war and the economy not being great.

Finally, politics seemed to go my way as Bill Clinton and Al Gore defeated Bush and Dan Quail. It was “the economy stupid” after all. At age 46, Clinton was young and hip, our first Baby Boomer president, who played sax on the Arsenio Hall Show. Hillary was a smart woman who actually wanted to accomplish something. I must confess I didn’t pay that much attention to politics in Clinton’s first term as I was busy starting Cherry Preschool and launching our younger two kids into college. Clinton was more of a centrist and triangulator than I preferred, but he actually balanced the budget and didn’t get into wars, so things felt pretty peaceful. Hillary attempted to draft a reasonable heath care reform policy, but that was a bust. There were rumblings about Clinton’s infidelity and affairs with many women, and he was disappointing in his tepid support of gays in the military and gay marriage. Still, he was not a Republican, so I felt like things could have and had been much worse. Plus, there was peace in Northern Ireland and an attempt at Israeli-Palestine peace at Camp David.

Clinton’s second term was poisoned for me by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Monica was a 22-year-old intern and Clinton was president – quite a discrepancy in power. In no way was that acceptable to me, even it if was consensual and he “didn’t have sex with that woman.” I was finished with Bill and his sexual and somewhat dubious legal shenanigans. Little did I know that it would be another long stretch until someone I respected occupied the White House.