I'm one of those. The once-upon-a-time liberal (with a small "l") Jewish voters who have never voted for a Republican candidate for President in their lives, but who will be voting for the incumbent Republican President today. I join with Meryl Yourish and Judith Weiss and Ed Koch and a whole host of other people who are making this switch. This will be my ninth presidential election, so that's saying something. And before I was old enough to vote, I worked for Eugene McCarthy in 1968.
Well, in that and other things, I was somewhat of a dupe. I know that now. This isn't the conservativism that allegedly sets in with old age. This is largely the result of access to news and information sources that more than occasionally manage to cross and transcend ideological and political boundaries. It's part of the wonder of access to the internet.
I'm a rather stubborn person. It wasn't easy for me to acknowledge that my youthful political views may not always have been informed by the most reliable sources -- that I preferred the lure and mystique (and music) of the love generation to the mothballs and crewcut prisiness of the 'America first' crowd. I'm ever so slightly reluctant to admit that I still do.
The good news is that my basic views on freedom and democracy and the rights of the individual, regardless of race, gender, culture, creed, religion or affectional preference, haven't changed. I still believe with all my heart that, given the chance, these values will prevail in America. But right now, America is at war with an amorphous entity that despises those values to a degree that, for some reason, its apologists here seem unable to comprehend. And until we win that war, some of our aspirations for the utopian future in which those values truly rule our society may have to be put on hold.
Deferred gratification is a concept that small children have trouble understanding. But adults striving for true freedom should be able to discern between false hope for a seductive "quick fix" and the long hard road that leads to the real thing. For all his faults (and they are many), President Bush represents the latter. His opponent, the former.
So here's hoping that President Bush is re-elected today, that we'll prevail in this war against Islamist extremists and their allies, and that in another four years we can once again return our attention to the true pursuit of those exalted personal liberties for which Democrats once stood proud.
