The internet says that 1980 when Reagan won the presidency was the year that the great industry centers along the great lakes fell on hard times and were called the rust belt. Champaign was 130 miles south of there but it got pretty rusty too, the storefronts were empty and I couldn't find a job. I ended up in Texas by the end of 1984, ruby red Texas where they loved Reagan. I felt like I was in enemy country. Then a real estate bust in Texas sent me to Chicago to live in my paretnts' attic. Herbert Walker replaced Reagan, wasn't as bad as I thought he was at the time, but still a republican. Then Bill Clinton took the presidency. Don't Stop Believing, his campaign song, filled the air as I inked the contract for my condo. Downtown which had forever been dormant after five pm and on weekends began to bloom under the Bill Clinton economy. Things were good.
But that's just in response to Beagles's memories of Reagan. In my narrative we were at the election of Obama, the triumph of The Liberal Agenda. At last we had won over the man in the street and everything was groovy.
It was a decisive victory and the word on the political street was coming in with the big mo you need to do something big. Healthcare had been a big stumbling block for the Clintons, but our charismatic new prez thought he could do it. Everybody agreed the current system was terrible so this could be a bipartisan thing, how great was that? But the republicans were in the thrall of the tea partiers who hated government and the last thing they wanted was for the government to do anything that the people would like. They dug in their heels, and the blue dogs that the dems picked up along with their decisive victory were hesitant, and the wheels came off the whole thing.
Well shit, apparently the masses had not seen the light. Well we scraped through, we got Obamacare which was not as thorough as we would have wanted, but was better than what preceded it, we did little things here and there. Four years later we defeated McCain who seemed then like a horrible warmonger, but now that the republicans have become the party of Trump, seems like a gentle statesman. We scaped along. Maybe this what not our time.
And then the anti-Christ came down the escalator. A total windbag, a failure with businesses that ran into bankruptcies, a guy no American bank would lend money too, a guy who cheated in his businesses and made his contractors sue to get the money they owed him, a boasting philanderer, a lying sack of shit with no attention span. You could smell the sulfur. Well surely the people who had been educated in our schools, who had benefited from our programs, who now had better healthcare than before, who had access to all the information on the internet, surely they would not get taken in.
To be continued,
PS, there is a comment at the end of this post.
I got this comment from a friend of mine who I knew when I lived in Southern Illinois:
ReplyDelete4 years later Obama defeated Romney. He faced McClain in 2008. The sentiments are still valid though, except that pesky ridicule of Romney for voicing that Russia was our number 1 adversary.
You're right about the order of McCain and Romney. I looked it up before I wrote it and got it right, but then when I wrote it for some reason I reversed the order.
As for Romney: I remember it well and I've thought about it as I was one of the people who was ridiculing him. The main threat from Russia is manipulating our elections and I don't think they were doing that then. And it isn't like Romney has any credentials as a foreign policy deep-thinker. It seemed then, and still seems to be now, that he was just pulling something out of cold war thinking. Romney was kind of liberal when he was governor of Massachusetts then when he was running for prez he became like a born again guy and I have long thought that he just adopted ideologies to fit the moment. Actually I rather liked that about him running in the rep primary, I'd rather have a guy who didn't much believe in anything than be a true believer like his opponents in the primary.