The first presidential election I was eligible to vote in was 1984.

I cast my ballot at the junior high school in my little hometown in Arkansas and walked out into the parking lot afterwards. There was a bunch of people milling around who’d either just voted, or were about to do so.

A guy I knew saw me and shouted: “Hey Steve! You voted for Reagan didn’t ya?!”

This was the year all the political analysts told us that all young white males in the South were voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election.

I said: “No!”

He shouted back: “You mean you voted for Fritz and … (here he used a four letter word that rhymes with “Fritz.” It was a sexist reference to the Democratic nominee, Walter “Fritz” Mondale’s female running mate, Geraldine Ferraro).

Surprisingly, everyone in the parking lot looked at me with their jaws hanging open instead of gawking at him.

Undaunted, I admitted that I indeed had voted for the Democratic ticket and the guy hung his head and shook it, as if he wondered what this world was coming to.

I wrote quite a few newspaper columns criticizing Reagan’s administration. My boss at the newspaper where I was working gave me an award that next year for losing him the most advertising. Then he slapped me on the back and told me to “Keep it up.”



More flack



In 1988 I went 0-2 in presidential picking with the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket over Bush-Quayle.

By the 1992 presidential election I’d moved from Arkansas to Mississippi. The two guys I’d had a job interview with in the Delta here in Mississippi had even threatened to throw me in Deer Creek when they asked me if I was a Clintonite and I said: “Yes.” I was hired anyway and told not to write any pro-Clinton columns. I did anyway — and they published them anyway. I even received an award for my columns that year from the Mississippi Press Association, not least of all for one special column about just how presidential I believed Bill Clinton to be.

Also during that election year my boss had asked me if I wanted to cover President Bush’s visit to Mississippi. I told him I didn’t much. He and the guy that was going to help him throw me into Deer Creek went. When they got back they quizzed me about where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

“Are you sure you didn’t go to President Bush’s rally?” I was asked.

There was this guy there in a chicken suit holding a sign that read “POULTRY PRODUCERS SUPPORT BUSH.” After President Bush took the podium, the man in the chicken suit flipped one side of his sign over the other to reveal the message: “CHICKEN GEORGE WON’T DEBATE BILL.”

Some guys worked their way into the crowd, picked up the chicken, and carried him out of the rally. It really wasn’t me, but I was never able to totally convince the folks I worked for that I didn’t own a chicken suit.

That year at the polls when I went to get my ballot, one of the die-hard Republican poll workers who loved to hate my columns every week said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Oh, don’t give him one, he’s voting for Clinton.” She thought she was being funny. No one laughed and I was handed my ballot along with an apologetic roll of the eyes from a different poll worker.



Make a decision



When the 1996 presidential election came around I was in Missouri, still writing columns, and working for a friend of mine who wasn’t a Clinton fan at all. When Clinton won in 1992 he’d put it on page 3 of the little daily paper he was running. I had to convince him in ’96 that we really should cover President Clinton’s nearby visit, with Hillary, Vice President Al Gore and Tipper. I covered their campaign stop only because my publisher friend did have a soft spot in his heart for Tipper.

In 2000 I didn’t vote in the presidential election. I still regret it. Still working in Missouri, I had moved back to Arkansas and didn’t bother to change my voter registration. I didn’t think my vote would matter anyway — I just knew Al Gore would win.

I wasn’t real fired up about our major party choices in the last presidential election. My favorite candidate was independent Ralph Nader, who told us: “The dreaded supremacy of corporatism over civil institutions, stomping both conservative and liberal values alike, has broken through any remaining barriers by the two major political parties.”

This presidential election year I like the apparent Republican nominee John McCain, and both of the Democratic candidates fighting for the nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Even if you’re not excited about any of these presidential hopefuls, please still be a part of the process and vote for a presidential candidate in the March 11 primary. These folks are asking us to give them the toughest job in the world and one of them is going to get it.



Steve Gillespie is managing editor of The Meridian Star. E-mail him at

sgillespie@themeridianstar.com.