Examining a Voting Record

On Tuesday, I am going to take a midterm and then go vote in my first presidential election. The midterm is on the inequality of nation--why we are so rich and everyone else is so poor. My vote is also on the inequality of nations--why we are becoming so poor and dragging the rest of the world down with us.

That's right, I'm voting on the economy, and I'm voting for the Democratic candidates. But that's not because I'm a single issue voter, or a single party voter. I want to secure abortion rights for women, institute gun control laws, reform education and health care and mandate stricter environmental codes. But above all, I want some kind of hope that there will be a job market when I graduate in June. And this year, the Democrats are the only ones garnering my trust.

After "12 years of trickle-down economics," as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton continually says, most Americans are thinking about a new way to order the economy. That attitude causes a lot of reflection on the past decade. What media pundits seem to be doing this year is investigating their own voting records and thinking about what they are going to do in this election. William Safire spun his wheels in The York Times Magazine. I have the Crimson. But having just turned 21, 1 don't have much of a voting record.

I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat, but I'm pretty damn close. I've certainly got the family credentials to back up my claim: My mother sat in at the 1964 Democratic National Convention to protest the Vietnam War; my father marched on Washington for civil rights and my brother headed National College Democrats while he was in school.

People in both parties are "moderates" these days. They pick and choose issues from each party and try to eke out some kind of political philosophy from that. Or they just follow Ross Perot, who claims to be in the middle, but doesn't seem to have any political philosophy at all. In my home state Pennsylvania, where people stick to party lines, the Democratic governor sounds more like a Republican with his anti-abortion, anti-birth control stances than the Republican senators, who favor more liberal programs.

That's why I registered to vote in Cambridge. In this state, a Democrat is supposed to be a Democrat, and they are supposed to rule. I thought I would have a safe haven finally to express my Democratic preferences.

But Massachusetts is just about as schizophrenic as Pennsylvania. While I might consider myself a Democrat, but I've never voted for a major Democratic candidate. Two years ago, I voted for William F. Weld '66 for governor. Despite his penchant for the death penalty, he supports abortion rights and is limited by a Democratic state legislature.

I actually did vote on a single issue in 1989--John Silber. I have this thing about totalitarian, racist, misogynist men running for state offices. I voted against him in the primaries. I even headed up to a caucus meeting at the Peabody School to try to get Harvard students elected to the state convention so that they could pick Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy to run instead. But we didn't succeed.

Ididn't vote for a Democrat in my first election, either. In a fourth grade mock election in 1980, I cast a ballot (a nicely colored one, however) for John Anderson, the independent candidate running against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Even with my feeble understanding of politics, I knew that Reagan wasn't going to be my sort of politician. And the next year, when he declared ketchup to be a vegetable in school lunches, I knew he was the wrong man for the job. For my friends who ate a balanced meal only at school, shriveled hamburgers, tater tots and ketchup just didn't cut it.

Carter was an even scarier prospect. It wasn't the hostages in Iran that got to me. It was the fact that he was nuclear physicist. Living within the evacuation zone of Three Mile Island, which had come to a near meltdown a little over a year before the election, convinced me that we didn't want anyone who understood nuclear power in the White House--they wouldn't be afraid of it. Even a year later, we were telling "glow in the dark" jokes. (Some mothers "wore combat boots" in childhood epithets. In our jibes, mothers "fished for three-headed trout in the Susquehanna for dinner.

Safire didn't reveal his electoral preference in his article, although a few days later he basically endorsed Clinton. After years of working for Republicans, he is kind of skeptical about Bush.

I'm just busy trying to be optimistic--about both of my tasks for Tuesday.

Beth L. Pinsker '93, editorial chair of The Crimson, writes this column every other Saturday.