Voter Vexation – the Quest for the Perfect Candidate
Our interest in politics began in the fall of 1968, when we were all of ten years old. The Republicans, who briefly flirted with the idea of a last minute, hastily-constructed campaign effort by California Governor Ronald W. Reagan, chose instead another Californian, the former Vice-President Richard M. Nixon. Meanwhile, the Democrats, reeling from the decision by incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek reelection at the end of March, and the June 6th assassination of front-runner Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, settled on Hubert H. Humphrey, the Minnesota liberal known to be a friend of big labor, and the incumbent Vice-President. So irritated with this choice of a pro-union liberal, the southern Democrats put their partisan loyalties aside, and urged Alabama Governor George C. Wallace to launch a third-party run. Wallace, famous for his resistance to racial integration and his oft-quoted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”, was actually one of the most successful third-party candidates in American history, having carried five southern states, and thus ensuring the greatest political comeback ever with the election of Richard Nixon as thirty-seventh President of the United States. It was Nixon, who famously lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 for the presidential election by less than 100,000 votes, who had announced his retirement from elective politics, following his failed bid to unseat the California Governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Sr. (father of current Governor Jerry Brown), two years later, bitterly saying to the adversarial press, “Think of all you will miss…you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” (It was the senior Brown who ultimately lost his bid for a third term to a movie-star-turned-politician Ronald Reagan in 1966, largely due to his mishandling of the Watts riots the year before).
That 1968 Presidential election had a voter participation percentage of 61%, one of the largest turnouts in U.S. history, and garnered so much attention that the 1969 Super Bowl, in which the Joe Namath-led New York Jets defeated the heavily-favored Baltimore Colts, “themed” its halftime show on voter participation- three months following the presidential election.
One of the things we learned as a ten-year-old, whose two major passions were, in order, the Baltimore Colts and presidential politics, was that it is the imperfect candidate who can win elections if, a), the candidate’s party rallies around its nominee (Nixon), and b), the other candidate’s party is divided (Humphrey and Wallace). Nixon, who our own parents derisively referred to as “Tricky Dick”, won the election, and handily so, because he faced a decidedly-divided Democrat Party.
Fast forward to this November of 2015, a full-year before the 2016 presidential election. While Democrats have pretty much united around Hillary Clinton and, setting aside a most improbable possibility, given the all-so-corrupt and partisan Justice Department under Barack Obama, that she might otherwise face indictments for having committed multiple felonies related to her e-mail obfuscation, while compromising national security relating thereto, the Republicans are in a comparative free-for-all with fifteen candidates still in the run for the G.O.P. nomination.
One need only read through Facebook commentaries to see that most Republican and conservative voters are saying, in effect, “I’ll vote for ‘x’ and maybe ‘y’ but certainly not for ‘z’, no way…” The aforementioned variables can and do interchangeably apply to Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump (given that Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Jim Gilmore, Lindsay Graham, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum are effectively, though not technically, out of the race). This, on its surface, suggests a historically-competitive race for the Republican nomination but, in reality, must be a veritable “wet dream” for Hillary Clinton who can sit back and watch the leading eight spend money trying to one-up each other in the feeding frenzy that has become all-too-evident, as never before.
In truth, there is only one way Republican voters can defeat Hillary Clinton next fall, in an election that should otherwise be theirs to lose. They must swallow their pride and commit themselves to support, campaign and vote for whoever becomes the eventual Republican nominee, regardless of who that person is, and regardless of that candidate’s imperfections. To do less will effectively bring about a third term for Barack Obama, which is making Hillary Clinton and her united Democrat Party drool at the prospect of winning an election which, on its surface, they should not come close to winning, but is nevertheless theirs for the taking, if Republicans don’t grow up and face the music of their own making.
-Drew Nickell, 3 November 2015
©2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.