Obama

Your politician doesn’t get elected, just wait four years, eight if you’re unlucky. Thanksgiving 2004 I’d already had a martini at some nameless suburban chain restaurant with my parents and my brother’s family. Everyone laughed, everyone told funny stories, everyone resurrected happy memories of good times through the years. After I started my second martini, Mom did it.

“Jim,” she asked, “what did you think about the election?”

She broke the rule. I took a sip of my martini.

“Mother,” I reprimanded with the nicest voice I could muster, “you know the rule. We don’t talk politics with each other. No exceptions.”

She persisted, no – she insisted. She loved my sense of history, she said, she wanted to know what I think. That didn’t work, so she used a different argument. I felt her needles prick my skin, I felt her Jungle Red-painted fingernails stabbing me in the back. And I felt her wagging her index finger in disapproval, echoing the refrain from my childhood, “You’re a bad boy, Jimmy Wood.”

All right, I thought, my anger spilling over into my drink, she can have the truth. So I gave it to her. I told her Bush was a killer, an idiot, and a liar. I told her the election was a travesty and like 2000, Bush had stolen the election from a good man – a really good man, this time. I told him he’d sullied the reputation of a military hero who’d had the courage to go to Vietnam when he acted the coward. And I told her that Bush was on his way to becoming the worst president ever.

“I can’t believe this,” she answered. “None of my sons has ever spoken to me in this manner.”