Perfection is never on the ballot

Every presidential election since I cast my first vote in 1948, I’ve heard young people deliver a version of, “I’m going to vote for Henry or Ralph or Jill. The two major ones are just the opposite sides of the same old coin. Or I may not bother to vote at all.” In fact, I believed it myself — said it aloud endlessly — until I voted for Democrat Harry Truman instead of Progressive Party candidate, my early hero, Henry Wallace, an Iowan long off the farm.

I had supported Wallace, urged others to join our crusade, attended a huge rally where he spoke. It was political epiphany time, but I soon found that we true believers were talking to ourselves … seeking an audience that didn’t really exist.

Third party votes were simply feel-good self-indulgence. That has certainly seemed apt this year. Only a Joe Biden vote — if he is the candidate — will keep Donald Trump out of the White House, and our country out of the dump. A wasted vote this year is more than just that. It could lead to the disaster and national disgrace of a second Trump term and future monarchy, as he will inevitably declare himself “President for Life.”

When I spoke to some high schoolers recently, all of this struck me as something that needed to be said. They see Trump for what he is, but don’t trust Democrat Joe Biden specifically because of his decisions in Gaza and the Mideast and were looking to shrug their shoulders and not vote … or possibly find a third voice.

If I had a soap box, I would proclaim from it that the two major parties are not the same ever and certainly not this year.

Franklin Roosevelt brought us Social Security over Republican opposition warning of a Communist plot. We ate when my brothers worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps that Republicans vilified. It kept us eating, including corn grown here. I cheered when President Truman integrated the armed forces and conservatives warned of ‘‘mingling the races.”

I watched younger friends go off to distant places to do good things when John Kennedy gave the Peace Corps life. I watched as Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law at the Truman Library with the former President looking on, smiling, applauding.

I lived through the New Deal, and first voted for the Fair Deal. I lived through the New Frontier and the Great Society. I marched for civil rights and have worked for change in our treatment of my friends and their partners in the LGBT community. America the Beautiful was more than a song title and Republicans couldn’t carry the tune.

Today, the two major-party candidates are focused on seven states that were almost even in 2020. — all were decided by less than 3 percentage points. In a couple of them, Trump and Biden were separated by just tens of thousands of votes.

Donald Trump has been anointed winner of the first debate, and it’s more than Joe Biden who lost. It is certainly more than the Democratic Party — it is the United States of America and our democracy.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.