I was born a Democrat. My parents were Democrats before me. My father cast his first vote at 21 in 1936, for FDR. Four years later, when she turned 21, my mother did the same. She came from a long line of Democrats, going way back to Jackson, I suppose. When 1861 came along, some of her kin hiked on the blue uniform, and some wore the grey, even though all were Virginians. And after that, they all carried on voting Democratic.
They were Southerners and Democrats. They never wavered from the party, even when many of their friends, associates and even some close relatives, gulped and embraced the GOP at the time LBJ signed the Civil Rights' Act. As New Deal Democrats, they morphed into Kennedy Democrats. When 1968 saw a disastrous four-way split in the Democratic Party, they voted for Hubert Humphrey; but they would have voted for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy all the same.
Both of them voted Democratic until their deaths, although my father was growing more and more disconcerted with some of the leaders emerging from the party's ranks. Although he voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, in the Virginia primary, he supported Jesse Jackson.
Jackson, he explained to me, was a real Democrat, who cared about the working man and the working classes.
Of course, you seldom hear about the "working classes" these days. I don't expect to hear about them from the Republicans, although they use them to garner votes; after all, the Republicans were only ever about business, and the bigger the business, the stauncher the Republican support. But the Democrats were all about the working classes, or the public sector service industries, and - above all - the unions.
