50 Years & Counting

Fifty years ago today - Thursday October 28, 2010 - I was counting the final days until the Presidential election between Dick Nixon and John F. Kennedy was to take place on November 8th, 1960. I was just 34 years old and it was my first foray into national politics. Prior to that campaign all my efforts had been at the local level such as Congressional contests or just plain grass roots politicking, and I had thrown myself into my job as assistant to Jack Styles who headed the Nixon/Lodge Registration and Get-out-the-vote project. My work was just about done and my teeth were on edge since I was convinced that that election might be considered the most important in my lifetime and that the fate of the nation hung in the balance.

---

That’s how I feel today as November 2nd sneaks up on us. There was no narcissus in the White House seeking to impose his brand of all-powerful coercive government on the nation – just plain old Dwight David Eisenhower who for eight years had commanded a tight ship as it battled the waves in the Cold War. Ike felt much as I did – he was deeply concerned that the Massachusetts womanizing playboy would prove unfit to run a nation caught up in a deadly Cold War where nuclear weapons were bound to be unleashed. When JFK’s victory was being attributed to vote fraud in Chicago Illinois and several other states, Ike was on the phone almost daily, hectoring the leadership at the Republican National Committee with demands that they take an aggressive posture and challenge the validity of the result– something they could not do because Dick Nixon didn’t want to look like a sore loser. Ike was right to be concerned as later events exposed JFK’s ineptitude. Less than two years later, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, I sat listening to him in his Gettysburg office as the man who planned and executed the incredibly complex Normandy invasion – one of the greatest military efforts in world history - expressed his astonishment at the administration’s inept handling of an invasion they sponsored that should have been a cake walk. In words that expressed the contempt he could never speak in public, he quoted approvingly France’s Charles De Gaulle as having referred to JFK as L’Enfant Jacques. Ike’s long since gone, but if he were still around I can imagine him being scared out of his wits over the prospect of two more years of a Congress solidly dominated by a Democratic majority in the House and Senate which shamefully supported their president as he went about dismantling the United States and attempting to reduce America to the level of his beloved Euro socialism. As I wrote above, 50 years ago I believed that the 1960 election would be the most crucial in our nation’s history. In some ways it was, but the threat we face today is far worse and potentially more dangerous. If the polls are right, America will get a second – and last - chance and we’ll be able to call a halt to President Obama’s plan to change America into something we do not want it to be. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to step into the breach and call a halt to the insanity Mr. Obama and his far-left cronies are seeking to impose on this nation. It’s all on the line now. We have to vote the rascals out. And they can be easily identified – if they are Democrats who inflicted the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on us and backed Obama’s programs that have driven us into near bankruptcy and cost millions of jobs, they have to go, every single one of them. If you live in Delaware, don’t let the media force you to vote against Christine O’Donnell and instead elect a Senator who will move heaven and earth to advance Obama’s destructive agenda. If you live in Massachusetts, do the nation a favor and get rid of Barney Frank before he does something else to wreck the economy. He’s got a fellow Marine fighting for his seat. Semper fi, vote for him. Californians should understand that it was their democratic legislators and greedy union bosses who drove the state into bankruptcy with their reign of squandermania inexplicably supported by the voters, and that voting for the likes of "Don’t call me ma’am" Barbara Boxer, and Jerry Brown is an act of suicidal lunacy. Throw the bums out. Every one of them. Make Ike smile as he looks down on us from his perch in paradise surrounded by Ronald Reagan, Dick Nixon, Jerry Ford and a host of other great Americans under the command of General George Washington. If they could get their hands on absentee ballots you know who’d get their votes.