Stapleton for the CRE

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by Jack Stapleton, Jr.

“I’m certainly not going to vote for…” is a phrase we’ll be hearing more and more in the days ahead. It’s that time of The Big Year. (The quadrennial period in which we choose our national and state leaders and most of our legislators.)

Even before New Hampshire, Iowa, and a few other renegade states jump-start the rest of the nation in the candidate-preference polls, we must first get through what is called The Candidate Rejection Era. This is followed by The Candidate Selection Era. Once all of this is over, we will return to The Candidate Rejection Era.

Frankly, I have always preferred the first Candidate Rejection Era. It just seems more democratic to reject wannabe presidents and governors and congresspersons and state legislators before the strenuous efforts of columnists, sages and political types to sway us to their way of thinking.

Candidate Rejection Era I started off with a bang when the Republicans began finding so many candidates nobody could remember them all. We heard from such old friends as Pat Buchanan and, you know, the former Vice President from Indiana who made “potatoe” the favorite fruit of late-show comedians and political pundits. For the sake of auld lang syne, we even entertained the thought of another Lamar Alexander campaign.

The GOP really delighted us with bringing back Steve Forbes, a chip off the block who is spending zillions of his late Dad’s money to get someone to agree with his favorite tax program: reducing levies for the rich and those who inherit their father’s millions. A few religious zealots rounded out the baker’s dozen of GOP hopefuls, but most of them are gone or turned independent or resumed studying the dictionary.

The Democrats, for a change, didn’t seem as crazy as the Republicans. This is usually the way when you have a vice president who doesn’t drool all over himself and is thus qualified to become his party’s leader once the real vote-getter is resigned to leaving the White House. The problem was that many voters had rejected Al Gore, who pretended he never read the newspapers during Monicagate, thus making many suspicious of his ability to say, “Bill, you’re a damned fool.”

Doubts increased after the vice president seemed to take credit for the creation of today’s computer technology. He did this while relating the juvenile rigors of living in a Washington luxury hotel, attending an Ivy League college and then actually running for President, finishing behind our own Dick Gephardt in the 1988 campaign when the Democrats had more candidates than votes.

The first Rejection Era is discouraging. We have had to learn that John McCain has a temper, Bill Bradley has been playing footsie with Wall Street brokers and has even ridden on their jet planes, while George W. Doesn’t know the name of the Chief Magistrate of the Punjab Province in India. Off with their heads!

Can we trust Al if he wasn’t anxious to kill some Viet Cong? Can we really admire Bradley if he’s too lazy to hitchhike to New Hampshire? Would George W. know where to bomb the enemy if he can’t identify them by name?

Still in the first stage, most of us have despaired of finding another Truman, Reagan, Kennedy or Eisenhower. “They don’t make candidates like they used to” is more than a rejection heard in Missouri courthouses, it’s voters’ daily mantra.

Time will soon prevail: the candidates will be chosen not on their ability to spell potato or hold their temper but on the basis of winning a few-hundred majority in a tiny state that has more characters than the Sunday funnies. We’ll do it scientifically, following New Hampshire with a cockamamie caucus in tiny Iowa, which gave us Tom Arnold, and then we’ll move on to South Carolina, which keeps giving us Strom Thurmond.

I don’t know about you but by that time I’m usually ready for Rejection Period II, when we choose our candidate scientifically. by voting for the nominee of the party our Granddaddy belonged [Missouri News & Editorial Service, Inc., Copyright (C) 1999 MNES Corp.]