Spitball Army

The 1980 Presidential election took place in the Fall of my Junior year in college.  The campus was flooded with propaganda in the form of buttons, pamphlets, stickers, and, of course, a full schedule of lectures and speakers.  At one point in either this election or the 1984 election (when I was both living in and employed by my former undergraduate house), Stephen Stills came by the Quincy House common room to sing a couple of songs and stump for his candidate (a Democrat, no doubt, but I can’t remember which one). College campuses are a prime target for political campaigns: the student population is full of impressionable young first-time voters eager to test out their new-found freedom to form and express their ideals, and the campaign machines are equally eager to harvest them for their causes.

I’ve got one little tiny Jimmy Carter button.  It is doubtful that it ever got any use.  The economy was in the toilet, there were long lines at the gas stations, and the Iranian hostage situation had been dragging on for months.  The general feeling was that Jimmy Carter had floundered in his last couple of years as President and would be ineffective to get the country out of its rut.

For a brief moment, it seemed, there was a blast of hope when Ted Kennedy announced a run for the Democratic nomination.  He took Massachusetts, his home state and my residence at the time, but lost in the Democratic Primary election to Carter.

Faced with a choice between Carter and Ronald Reagan, I chose to go “independent,” and backed John Anderson, a Republican congressman from Illinois who dropped his GOP affiliation for this election.  There was a sizable groundswell of support for Anderson on the Harvard campus.  I even participated as a runner in a “Run for Anderson” footrace along the Charles River, from which I saved a placard that I sadly discovered recently had been ruined by mildew and insects.  Anderson’s running mate, the former Democratic governor of Wisconsin Patrick Lucey, has since vanished from the collective memory, but there was some excitement about the bi-partisan nature of the ticket.

Reagan eventually won, as history has recorded, taking even the strongly-Democratic state of Massachusetts.  John Anderson got 7% of the national vote in the final election.  Former California governor Jerry Brown fell out after the Democratic primary but, on either a trunk or an old piece of luggage somewhere in my cluttered house, I have affixed a “Brown for President” sticker.