I really think I remember going with my mom when she voted for Johnson - Lyndon, not Andrew. Could that be? I was born in 1963.
Anyway, I remember Nixon being elected the first time and the second time of course. My dad, all these years later, still loves to throw the word “facist” around, and the Nixon of those elections was one of those. Then, of course, he became a crook - a crook whose shenanigans got in the way of my stories in 1974. I remember the relief when he resigned being in no small part due to the return of my summer viewing routine and my dad calming his ass down. I lived in Bangor, ME during his second campaign. First we lived downtown among the seminary crowd who were all liberal peace marching, McGovern loving hippy freaks like my family and then we moved to the Capehart section and I was shocked, SHOCKED that my military family classmates loved that facist pig Nixon.
It was bound to happen eventually anyway, but boy, sjc, you’ve really set a hermeneutic trend…
Continuing with the misinterpretation: Showing my age, the earliest memory which comes to mind is George Bush introducing this (which I could swear he did on the original broadcast, though the article doesn’t seem to say so, and memory is so unreliable…).
I also have some kind of memory of Bill Clinton, at one his inaugurations, signing his name and getting some laughter, and my mom explaining that he was clowning around and using a differently colored pen for each letter, or something like that. But some superficial Googling/YouTubing doesn’t seem to reveal any factual basis for this memory; does anyone have any idea what this terribly mundane piece of memetic minutiae might be grounded in?
It’s a common practice for a President signing “historic” legislation to use a different pen for every letter of his name, then giving the pens to sponsors of the legislation, former Presidents who supported the legislation but couldn’t get it passed during their terms, etc. Maybe that’s what you remember.
ETA: Oh yeah. my first Presidential memory? I was 4 years old and my mother took me along when she voted. I remember an old fashioned style voting machine with a curtain that pulled shut around you, and my mother pulling a LOT of levers. My parents weren’t the type to pull the “straight ticket” lever.
The first thing that personally affected me from a presidential election had to have been from 1975, early 1976. I was in second grade and Ted Kennedy was beginning some campaign stumping. Our teacher, a die-hard Kennedy supporter, decided that this was historic, and we all had to watch it.
In second grade I found politics boring. As did most of my friends. The teacher had turned down the lights, so I couldn’t distract myself by reading. So I talked a friend into grabbing one of the card games that were kept in the cabinets by the side of the classroom. And we started playing.
Our teacher descended upon us in a fury that made her face seem to glow. “How dare you not pay attention to your candidate for president!?!?!”
When I was little, my mom and I were at the airport all the time dropping my dad off and picking him up when he traveled on business. (When he was away, the morning he left I’d kiss him extra for all the days he wouldn’t be there.) So, with late planes and such, we spent a LOT of time at the airport. There used to be an observation garden where you could watch the planes taking off and landing (I know, and they didn’t even give us background checks!) and I remember well there was a speaker box with a button on it, and if you pushed it it played Reagan’s inaugural address. Weird, huh?
First presidential activity: if Desert Shield counts, watching my dad leave to go board the Aegis cruiser. I was just a baby, but I remember the moment of realization that he was leaving for a long time, like it was yesterday. That was easily one of the most traumatic moments of my childhood. It took a long time to understand why he was leaving and why he would be gone so long.
The first election I remember: 1992 vaguely (my babysitter liked Ross Perot), 1996 more solidly–I remember watching the debate and being struck by Dole’s brazenness. He would get a question and answer the question before that one, then answer that one after getting the next question, etc. I remember thinking, “Who does he think he’s fooling?” Oddly enough, I’m pretty sure that my mom, a lifelong Democrat and a damn smart cookie from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Minnesota, actually voted for Dole that year. My dad, a lifelong Republican who clashed with his U.S. Regional Attorney father about welfare, voted for Clinton.
I had no idea who Reagan was until a couple of years after his presidency. The first time I remember being aware of the President was in first grade; I remember the teacher writing on the chalkboard that it was 1992 and the president was George Bush.
As someone who worked at the poll on Super Tuesday, I have to tell you that you have no idea how common this is, in all age groups.
Sigh. Bad memories. “Why can’t I vote for Ron Paul?”
Well, the fact that he pardoned Richard Nixon is a fairly telling clue.
I’m pretty sure Andrew Johnson never ran for President.
Just FYI, I’m pretty sure you mean “fascist”, unless Nixon just really liked faces.
We moved to the US when I was 12, but I consider Lexington, MA my hometown. The first presidential activity I remember is protesting Pat Buchanan speaking on the Lexington town green. I think my whole high school turned out.
I remember voting in my preschool election in 1968. I thought about voting for Nixon because his name reminded me of kitty whiskers (although I had earlier in the year been a fervent supporter of McCarthy) but went with Wallace because his name sounded big and strong, like a wall.
Later I went home and was busy playing when my mom told me to stay in the yard a couple minutes, she was going to cross the street to go to vote. I told her she didn’t need to vote, as I already had. She asked me who I had voted for. When I told her she screamed a lot of stuff I couldn’t understand.
I remember Carter’s presidency, but the first election I remember is 1984. I was one of a handful of kids in my class who voted for Mondale. I even had his name written on my folders, lol.
In high school I cast one of under 50 ballots for Dukakis in a school of about 1200.
In 1992, I volunteered for Clinton’s campaign the fall of my freshman year of college.
I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 with my family. My grandfather, the patriarch, commented, “Kennedy’ll never win…he’s too d*mn ugly.” Little six-year-old me piped up, “he’s not ugly, & he doesn’t sweat like that other ugly guy!”
In 1964, incumbant Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater. My sixth-grade teacher told us she’d never vote for Goldwater & our parents shouldn’t either because, “he’s a socialist & that’s the same as a communist!” I went to the school library & copied the entries for both “socialism” and “communism” from an encyclopedia. I showed them to my teacher & tried to tell her that they were different. As we’d recently been introduced to dictionaries, enclyclopedias, and other sources of data for research, I thought she’d be pleased. Instead, I ended up in the principal’s office & had the next day off from school.
My dad and I hung a McGovern sign outside the house in the fall of 1972. That election night, we all went down to campaign HQ (an empty store). I got to try beer for the first time. I was 5. It was cool, except when they told me George didn’t win.
Wha-buzzah? “Communist” *or * “Socialist”, associated with Barry Goldwater and presented as a reason to vote for LBJ instead, well, the mind bluescreens!
Heh, good point. Speaking of which, hope everything’s going well, sjc; I recall reading some news stories about your health taking a turn for the worse around two years ago. How’d that end up turning out?
When I was nine the Ayatollah said he wouldn’t release the hostages until Carter stepped down. Somehow my brain flipped that into “Carter won’t step down until the hostages are freed”. I remember thinking that was terribly unfair of him and that Something Bad would happen if he didn’t leave when he was supposed to.
