The presidential election of 1972 was the first in which I was eligible to vote. I had returned from Vietnam the year before, too young to drink but old enough to take an interest in politics, and I closely followed Hunter S. Thompson's accounts of fear and loathing on the campaign trail in Rolling Stone magazine. George McGovern was challenging Richard Nixon, and the choice to me was clear: McGovern, the Democrat, believed in the power of government to help people. Nixon saw that same power as a way to control them. I proudly cast my first presidential vote for George McGovern, who died last month at age 90.
My vote turned out to be largely symbolic. McGovern and his running mate, Sargent Shriver, carried only one state — Massachusetts, of course — and the District of Columbia, as Nixon and Spiro Agnew were re-elected in the proverbial landslide.
For a few seconds that year, a McGovern victory had seemed possible. But as his campaign degenerated into chaos and confusion and his defeat became a certainty, supporting him morphed into merely an indication of a person's political persuasion instead of an expectation that he would win.
His quest became a metaphor for my generation's experience: High hopes that dissolved into despair over what might have been. A chance for enlightened, significant change in the way we viewed ourselves and others was killed by cynicism, greed and corruption. It was cold comfort to McGovern supporters such as myself that both Nixon and Agnew later resigned in disgrace when they were exposed as moral reprobates of the lowest order. Being right isn't always cause for celebration.
Now it's 40 years later, and this year's election again pits aggressively hidebound conservatives against fragmented and flailing liberals. I had thought, back then, that by this time the country's political differences would be a bit narrower. Instead, they seem to have grown wider and deeper.
This time, however, it isn't the loony left that is the extremist party, but the rabid right, with its hard core of wild-eyed zealots who have raised the tenor of political discourse but not the substance. In another odd twist, the Republican candidate is the former governor of Massachusetts, that bastion of liberalism and the only state to support McGovern in 1972. The fact that Mitt Romney is a gazillionaire Mormon businessman and is trying to unseat the nation's first African-American president reminds me of a script for a National Lampoon mockumentary — without the humor. This will be the first election in which my two sons are old enough to vote. Although the stakes are high, as they are always are, my boys aren't as emotionally invested in this election as I was in 1972. I don't see how they could be.
Back then, revolution was in the air. Many of us felt, at least for a while, that profound change — starting with the ballot box — was possible. But today's political climate is so toxic and vicious that I can't blame my boys for viewing politics as low farce and the province almost entirely of morally bankrupt misfits.
Oh, wait; that's how I feel, not them. I really haven't asked either of my boys how they view politics in general. They don't seem that interested, which I think may be a good thing.
Nevertheless, I've told them how important I believe it is that they cast a ballot.
But when they ask why, I stutter and stammer and struggle to explain. I know there is a good reason, but after watching elected officials promote their usually self-serving agendas, often for the benefit of a privileged few — and seeming to enjoy it — I can't put my finger on it.
I have avoided asking my sons whom they will support. That isn't the point. I have tried to get across to them the idea that voting is more than an academic exercise without consequences.
I told them to think of being hunkered down in a foxhole, surrounded by death and destruction, wherever the next war is — there's always a next war — and wondering how they got there. It could happen, I tell them.
The choice to me in 2012 is again clear. I hope it is to my sons, too.
Bill Federman is a Times Union editor. His email address is bfederman@timesunion.com.