Lock Him Up

In the forty-six years that I have been eligible to vote, I have never failed to do so.

It doesn’t matter whether the election was for a Federal, State or Local office. It didn’t matter if it was a primary or general election. It didn’t matter whether I was living in New York or away at college. I always cast a ballot either in person or by absentee.

It has always been my firm belief that if you don’t exercise your right to vote then you forfeit your right to complain.

I have been a candidate for office seven times. I have run in three primary elections and four general elections. I have experienced the thrill of victory and the pain of defeat.

I have worked in countless campaigns for candidates seeking office at every level of government. I don’t have an accurate count of how many were successful and were not.

Sometimes the election involved an issue that was deeply personal to me.

In 1968, before I was eligible to vote, I worked in the Presidential primary campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. The war in Vietnam was raging and I had many friends who both volunteered and were drafted and sent to Vietnam. Some came home safely, some came home badly wounded and some didn’t come home.

I though the war was a tragic mistake and I worked hard for any candidate who would end it so that any more friends or young men would be put in harm’s way.

Senator McCarthy wasn’t elected and the war continued under President Nixon into the next Presidential election.

In 1972, at the age of twenty-two, I ran in the New York Democratic Presidential primary election as a delegate pledged to Senator George McGovern, who also pledged to end the war. I was elected and went to the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach that summer where McGovern was nominated. He was overwhelmingly defeated by Nixon that November.

During Nixon’s second term, the nation learned about Watergate and the numerous crimes and “dirty tricks” that the Committee to Re-Elect the President had engaged in to bring about Nixon’s re-election.

Even though the Watergate scandal and criminal prosecutions ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation, nobody claimed that the election was ‘rigged.”

This year, before any votes have been cast, we are being told that the election is “rigged” and the outcome will have no integrity.

It is a curious claim because it comes from a candidate who didn’t utter it until he sensed that the election was slipping away from him.

He made no such claim during the primary season when he was winning each of the Republican Primary races.

He did claim that the results of the Iowa Caucuses were skewered by Ted Cruz who falsely reported that Ben Carson had discontinued his own campaign on the day of the caucuses.

I glean from this, that Trump believes, If Carson’s turnout had not been affected, that he and not Cruz would have won that contest.

That suggests a narcissism and self- grandiosity that is unparalleled even in politics.

What makes his claim that the election is” rigged” so incongruous is that the only evidence that anyone is trying to rig it, comes from the Russian intelligence sources who are hacking into the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign officials and who are leaking them to their compatriot the accused rapist, Julian Assange, who is hiding out in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. They are trying to “rig” the election in Trump’s favor.

Yet, we hear no condemnation from Trump about this foreign interference in an election for our highest office.

Trump’s claim that the election is “rigged” rests upon the racist premise that voter fraud occurs on a massive scale among African-American voters. He has issued a call to arms to his Neo-Nazi, alt- right supporters to become vigilantes on Election Day and “monitor” voting in inner-city precincts. This is recklessness that borders on criminal.

In my lifetime, I have seen demagogues like Alabama Governor George Wallace seek the Presidency by appealing to the worst instincts of the American people.

Even as Wallace must have known that he would be defeated, he didn’t attempt to foster violence on the day of the election or undermine the integrity of the outcome.

I can think of no candidate in history who has done this.

Our full and free elections throughout our history have been a beacon for the rest of the world.

I’ve thought long and hard about what should be done to someone who would undermine our democracy in this way.

Only one thing comes to mind.

Lock him up.