YOU'RE VOTING FOR WHO? There must have been 10 or so of us, sitting around a table at the Commons dinner hall at Goddard College, all examining the absentee ballots we had received from our home states. The year was 1976, and this was the first time any of us would vote to elect a U.S. president. In residence at one of the most hippy-dippy schools ever conceived (though conceived before the existence of hippies), it was assumed by everyone at the table we would all vote for the Democrat, Jimmy Carter, governor of Georgia. Well, that would be, assumed by everyone but me.
I knew I wasn't voting for Carter. I liked Jerry Ford; he was doing an okay job. I was happy not to have to hear any more from or about Richard Nixon. Furthermore, I did not trust Southerners. But more than anything, I was crazy about First Lady Betty Ford, and thought it spoke well of the president that he had had the stones to marry an outright feminist, and to stick by her as she spoke her outrageous convictions -- especially her support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Jerry Ford never apologized for his wife -- not when she said that premarital sex might lower the divorce rate, not when she said stay-at-home moms should be compensated for their work, not when she compared the use of marijuana by my generation to her own cohorts' love of beer. Best of all, the first lady said she trusted her daughter, Susan -- the same age as me -- to make good decisions for herself in matters concerning sex. And the president never contradicted her -- at least not publicly. ERA notwithstanding, I lost my place in the Fellow Travelers Club that day at Goddard. I had already been rendered suspect by my unrepentant use of lipstick and a penchant for traipsing across the snowy hills in platform sandals, but my revelation of the cast of my presidential ballot drew looks of incredulity. No one really berated me; they sort of stammered their protests. My vote for Gerald Ford was the last I would ever cast for a Republican presidential candidate (unless you count the renegade John Anderson), for Gerald Ford was the last Republican presidential contender to maintain a modicum of independence from the party's woman-hating right wing. In my ignorance, I had overlooked Ford's veto -- thankfully overridden -- of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a move advised, against Ford's own instincts, by then Chief-of-Staff Richard V. Cheney. So, today I scratch my head, as I ask, How did a politician as non-ideological as Ford wind up saddling us with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a government lawyer (then Assistant Attorney General) named Antonin Scalia?
--Adele M. Stan
