THE COLOR PURPLE

My first "election reflection" is of the Dewey-Truman race in 48' As a child, I went to bed thinking Dewey was president and found out the next morning that it was Truman. The election seemed pedestrian compared to the passing of FDR a few years before. That man Roosevelt, we didn't personally know him, but we felt that he knew us.

It was more clear to me that Ike won in 52' and I told my teacher about my discovery. She said the Republicans had to win to remain a viable political party. Well, she didn't exactly say it  that way,

but that was the message. By 56' Ike had won another and in 60' I stayed up a good part of the night as JFK won with a little help from the grateful dead in Chicago. I had given a speech for him in a history class at school as a "Protestant for Kennedy." I was preaching to the choir. Half of the room was Jewish and ready for change.

64' for me was a shallow win. I didn't believe Johnson but I recall the major changes by 65' Something was in the air about change. This meant reducing poverty, relaxing race relations, and stopping the war. That didn't exactly happen. After RFK was assassinated, Nixon was the one. That election started a  7 out of 10 wins for the Republicans.

Johnson was a big blue win, but I did not know that at the time. There was a short flurry of blue the day LBJ announced he would not run again. However, all that died by the end of the 60's. Bobby

was the last great hope of the Liberal-Left for the decade. The rest of the century was a stream of

red. Nixon easily beat Mc Govern as I stuffed envelopes in Council Bluffs, Iowa for the Senator from South Dakota. By 76' Governor Carter was a new Democrat that promised not to be too liberal, but it did not work and there began a Red Revoltution in Reagan who outnumbered Carter and easily beat Mondale.

By now the era of good feeling experienced during World War II had all but collapsed. We knew the enemy. It was first Hitler, then Stalin and finally Liberals. If you were one, you kept your mouth shut. Dukakis didn't have the stomach for his 88' campaign and by 92' Clinton was the Centrist Democrat to win, but had a past. He stumbled through his first 2 years and caused the Gingrich Revolution of 94' That lasted until of 06' It was a 12 year revolution and another win for Big Red.

As I was correcting papers during election night of 00' and listening to the radio, a fellow faculty member named Jules shouted down the hall "Gore took Florida." That was a bit premature. Gore  won the election, but lost the electoral college. Kerry in 04' lost both.

As this is being written, we have finally arrived at purple. Purple is not an exhilarating time, but it is

a time for Liberals and Conservatives to finally land back on earth. The Conservatives feel that this is just a short interlude until they earn the power back, but for the moment the Democrats have became a national party again and got those Blue Dogs back from the south and the west.

Before the Big Blue flame out in the 60's there was a short period when all things appeared possible and one had a feeling of a spiritual movement that took many years of grief after it quickly died with a disco beat. The biggest red came in the early 80's when Reagan rode tall in the saddle. Reds wanted to see that nearly all become born again and it was possible to change the country and then the world. Those feelings are not dead, but they are diminished. In just a few years, the Dems won't have Bush to kick around anymore and the next Republican president seems to be in the making.

The reign of the color purple however short it may be, will breed discontent and again, one color or the other will reign supreme, exhilarate the masses, and then die. The color of purple may be easy to live with at the moment, but it just can't last. There is an elusive butterfly somewhere flapping its wings and the times are changing and changing and then changing back.