I got my voter registration card today. It says the word DEMOCRAT in nice capital letters.
Now, it's not my first. But it's the one I'm proudest of. Find out why below the fold...
I'm 38, and voted in every election for which I've been eligible since 1986. But I bought a house 10 years ago, and when I filled out the voter registration card for the move, I managed to check of (R) instead of (D).
To me, when I figured it out, it wasn't that big a deal. I live on the "rural and remote Eastern Shore of Maryland" ( © The Washington Post), where the D's are R's and the R's are R's, and no one's pro-choice, everyone's for gun rights and everyone wants their property taxes to go down and no one wants to spend more on schools and Ronald Reagan is treated as a saint.
The MD Democratic Party is basically a nonentity in my neck of the woods (I'm not sure they even have an office in my Congressional district, and if they do, I bet it's on the Western Shore), and I had a Congressman, who, even as a R, was voting for environmental protections. The only time he had a D opponent that could have won was Tom McMillan, and he was bought and paid for by banking PACs from across the nation, so I voted R in the Congressional races with little hesitation. I'd vote Dem for governor (except for Schaefer) and state Att'y General and Senate, and state legislature races and county council. I voted Gore in '00 and Kerry in '04.
It just didn't seem worth the bother to get it fixed - I could vote how I wanted in the general election, and in the primaries, it usually didn't make a dime's worth of difference anyway. So why bother?
Then Bush assumes the presidency. I was pissed - he had stolen the election! But I've got kids, my teaching takes up time, my coaching takes up time, the local voting office closes before I can get there, a million little excuses.
What made me finally decide to correct this error? When my president was allowed to tap my phone calls, without telling anyone, and use that evidence to throw me in jail, without telling anyone, not charge me with a crime, not let me see the evidence against me, not let me see a lawyer, not let me communicate in any way to anyone outside of my confinement and not even tell my family where I am. Am I afraid this is goijng to happen to me, personally? No. But that's not the point. This wasn't America, this was Stalinist USSR. It was time to change.
I'd had enough.
So I filled out that form to change party affiliation when I voted in the September primary (thank you Dems for passing the legislation making that possible), and I plan on voting for Democratic across the board this fall. In fact, I even made my first political contribution - to Andrew Duck (no relation, imagine that!) in a district 3 hours away from mine in MD.
Had enough? That's a winning thought for this fall. I think, at long last, America has had enough. Vote Dem in '06!