Why I vote Democratic

As a Georgia voter trapped in Hall County, I vote as much a Democratic ticket as possible. Why? Some influence from my mother while watching Nixon/Kennedy debate. She said something like, "We're Democrats because we're poor people. Democrats are for the poor people.' That would be the very start.

Not done. The Democratic Party maintained an office/store front one block from our home. When I walked by, I always read the Kennedy 'Ask not' quote. More reinforcement. Then, always more news on that President until I associated even the Presidential seal as being Kennedy's seal, not a seal of office. Remember I turned 5 in 1960.

The 1963 assassination fixed Kennedy and the Democrats as being the only choice. I had a fist fight with my best friend in 1964 over the Goldwater/Johnson election.

Then, the war, the protests, drugs, and hippies moved me towards my father's world view. By 1972, I voted Republican in my first secret ballot.

By 1980, after taking a few college courses, watching Nixon's treason followed by Ford's pardon, and my first real world job working with a group of men/mechanics, members of the Teamsters Union, I had voted for Carter and found nothing but terror in that actor from Hollywood.

After Reagan, I became a solid Democrat for economic reasons, an ever increasing awareness of my social obligations as a humble member of the working class.

By 1990, I knew my place in the world. I had grown up as a son of a disabled Korean War veteran and the oldest male child of four children. My parents had been forced to feed me with food stamps and the free cheese package. At my birth, we lived in public housing. Later, in a shoddy home bought through the VA programs, bill collectors hounded us on Saturday mornings. Once, we had our power cut off while my parents were at work. A wonderful way to act. As teenager, even the money I made in odd jobs went towards emergency bills.

So I knew by 1986 that I would never be an uncouth member of the newly rich shunned by old money.

So I vote for the Party of social programs like food stamps, public housing, rent control, a mild pro-union attitude, Medicare, Medicaid, free public schooling, that Old Age program called Social Security, and the ghosts of the elder Kennedy sons, Jack and Bobby, and my mother's ghost, watching a black and white TV telling me in a Kenndy like speech, 'Democrats are for the poor people, not poor in spirit, nor poor in family, nor even poor in wealth. But poor through exclusion by a system often if not always tilted towards wealth and the many types of power passing sometimes as leadership.