As a Depression baby, I am of course a full-blooded, registered, purebred, yeller dawg Democrat. To us, Franklin D. Roosevelt had always been president and would always be president. Grandpa Boman’s house was plain, but it did have one decoration: a big portrait of FDR right there on the wall.
There were a couple of Republican families in our town, and a couple down Yellow Creek Road. Nice folks, but considered a bit strange.
Having said all that, I have to confess that it worries me, well, a little bit, to see the Republican Party seemingly trying to destroy itself. There have been many Republicans I admired — Abraham Lincoln, the other Roosevelt. I even like what little I know about Silent Cal. And Hoover wasn’t as heartless as he has been portrayed. He just happened to be there at the wrong time.
William F. Buckley was a conservative/Republican who often made sense. I love reading James J. Kilpatrick, whether he’s writing about politics or grammar. You couldn’t help liking Sen. Everett Dirksen. Loved to hear him talk about anything. George Will is a conservative with sense. I even got to like Barry Goldwater as a man. We didn’t agree on a lot of things, but we certainly did when it came to Jerry Falwell and the religious right, which the party later embraced. And Gen. Colin Powell seems to be a sensible, sensitive man.
And there are, of course, some local Republicans that I admire very much, even if they’re wrong. Everybody has the right to be wrong.
How it must hurt and embarrass folks like that to see what the GOP has become, a fringe ultra-right group that is anti-choice and anti practically everything, especially things that help the poor and needy: I’ve got mine, sucker. Do the best you can.
On TV, you can see General Powell, for example, almost shudder when the names of clown Limbaugh and his ilk are brought up, to know that Limbaugh is the de facto head of the Republican Party, along with Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, who, truth be told, is drop-dead gorgeous, period. (She wants to teach children that the world started 6,000 or 8,000 years ago.) You can see Powell thinking: We have come to this?
Confession: I voted Republican once, my first time to vote in a national election. Not because I was that crazy about Ike, although he wasn’t bad, but because that year, the Democratic symbol at the top of the ballot was a rooster with a banner proclaiming White for the Right. I couldn’t go there.
If the Democrats are smart, they will play up the fact that Limbaugh is the head of the Republican Party, because in any nationwide election, Limbaugh and his dittoheads wouldn’t have a chance.
Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.
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