A personal history of presidential history

From the very first Bush to the very last election

Oct 30, 2024

A boy in a blue t-shirt holding an orange basketball. — This boy voted for Billy.

Notes on every presidential election in my lifetime

Below are my recollections of every presidential election I’ve ever lived through. Each election year is sectioned in chronological order, so that Email Club readers may skip to their favorite election years.

I apologize in advance for my extremely embarrassing opinions.

1988 (2 years old)

I form my first memories when I’m on a road trip to Utah with my family. I remember winding mountain roads, tall white ceilings in my aunt’s and uncle’s house, and my cousins jumping up and down on something called a trampoline.

I don’t recall an election, but cursory research indicates that a new president was chosen this year.

1992 (6 years old)

My Kindergarten teacher gives us all little white slips of paper with a list of at least three names on them. We are told to circle the name we like the best. I just learned how to read, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of any of these names.

I ask my friends who they’re circling. One kid says one of the names runs the country, but he disagrees with another kid about which one. Some other kid says she’s gonna circle the name that her parents are gonna circle, which is weird because I don’t think parents get to participate in this activity.

I see one of the guys on the list is named Bill, and that’s cool because I have a friend named Bill. (We call him Billy, but that’s the same name.) I circle Bill’s name.

The paper slips are collected and counted, and later the school-wide results are announced. Bill wins. We congratulate Billy on his victory.

1996 (10 years old)

Bill Clinton is the president, and Bob Dole is the guy running against him. My awareness of politics is informed by watching late night comedy shows, so what I know is that Bill Clinton loves McDonald’s and lactates prolifically, while Bob Dole is very old and speaks exclusively in the third person.

As a 10-year-old, I idolize Norm MacDonald. When Norm becomes the de facto Bob Dole impersonator on SNL, that probably clinches my support for Dole. I don’t know what a 15% flat income tax is, but I think it’s funny how Norm keeps saying “Bob Dole! Fifteen percent flat tax! Bob Dole!” like he’s some sort of Bob Dole Frankenstein monster.

The real Bob Dole seems funny, too. I watch him in a debate with Bill Clinton, and I laugh when he says, “And when [my plan] does work, Mr. President, I know you will congratulate me.”

Bob Dole lost anyway. Norm MacDonald still gets to do Weekend Update, though.

2000 (14 years old)

Al Gore seems like a way smarter guy than George W. Bush, but it doesn’t seem like there’s that big of a difference between the two. Bill Maher keeps calling them “Gush and Bore,” which is funny to me.

I guess I’m kinda pulling for Bush. I like the historical implications of electing the son of a former president, because that only happened once before. And Will Ferrell’s Bush impression is hilarious — maybe he’ll stay at SNL longer if Bush wins.

Then there’s even more history: Bush loses the popular vote, but it looks like he might win the election anyway. That hasn’t happened in over a hundred years. That’s so cool! Turns out I’m really into history, and it’s happening in my lifetime. I was kinda worried I was living through gush-boring times, but at least something interesting is happening.

2004 (18 years old)

This year I’m old enough that my country could send me to another country to kill people, so that means I get to vote.

As it turns out, my country is killing people in two countries right now. Everyone these days likes to say that America has a “professional military” and we’re past the time of needing a draft, so I don’t think my country is going to make me go kill anyone. Even so, George Bush doesn’t seem to be doing a good job of running these wars, and it sure seems like the one in Iraq shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

John Kerry fought in another war we probably shouldn’t have gotten ourselves into. When he came home, he protested against it. He seems like a decent man, one with a moral conscience about killing people in other countries at least. He is the first presidential candidate I ever vote for.

I’m in disbelief when he loses. Bush did such a bad job, and his failures seem so self-evident. I can’t believe that he actually did better in 2004 than he did in 2000. It doesn’t make any sense. I stay up all night IMing friends and despairing.

One of my friends sends me John Kerry’s concession speech. It’s the best speech he gave all year.

What you did made a difference, and building on itself, we go on to make a difference another day. I promise you, that time will come. The election will come when your work and your ballots will change the world, and it's worth fighting for.

2008 (22 years old)

There’s a joke in 30 Rock that Jack Donaghy tells about Liz Lemon dating a guy with an Obama sticker on his ukulele. In 2008, this is quite literally me.

I adore Barack Obama. I give $10 to the Obama campaign, when I probably don’t have $10 to give. It’s the first campaign contribution I ever give. After eight years of a “you’re either with us or against us” regime, where being in opposition to the president had been recast as opposition to my country at large, Obama gives me a new permission and pathway to feel proud of where I’m from.

That feeling mostly comes from his campaign themes and messages — that hopey-changey stuff — but it also comes, in part, from the opportunity he represents. All my life grown-ups have been telling me this noble lie that anyone in America can be or can do anything they set their minds to, all while a procession of 42 White men ruled supreme across history. My generation could make honest liars of all of us, and Obama seems worthy of the distinction.

But I can appreciate John McCain, too. He seems unafraid to think for himself, and he bats down the manifest racism that could propel his campaign if he chose to embrace it. I wonder if part of him knows he’s playing a supporting role in this moment. If Obama is leading a march toward our better angels, McCain is the chaperone in the back ushering us away from the demons.

McCain’s concession speech is my favorite of any I’ve heard. It expresses everything I want to be true.

I've always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Senator Obama believes that, too. But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

2012 (26 years old)

It’s past the point when it’s fashionable, but I still adore Barack Obama.

I’m dispositionally incapable of valorizing or deifying anyone, which maybe insulates me from the letdown when President Obama doesn’t live up to every lofty aspiration I had for him as a candidate four years ago. He’s a well-intentioned, imperfect human being running the world’s largest bureaucracy, with all its systemic defects and profoundly amoral trappings.

Presidents push buttons, flip switches, and pull levers of a gargantuan, fritzy, impossibly delicate machine with no user manual, all while projecting a bulletproof confidence that they know what they’re doing and the machine works just as it should and will continue to work in perpetuity, no matter who’s in charge of it — but especially while they’re in charge of it, even though they mostly have no control over it. In our presidents, we encourage self-delusion when we should be seeking competence. We yearn for transcendent saviors; we need benevolent bureaucrats, the do-no-harm, leave-it-a-little-better-than-you-found-it types.

There are people around me — kin and acquaintances — who insist his success is fraudulent or imaginary. Some of them suggest, or say outright, that the only reason he got elected is because he’s Black, as though the 42 White men before him persevered in spite of this innate disadvantage. (Perhaps they’d prefer that Blackness should be disqualifying for all who wield its mysterious power in any manner deemed inappropriate by those who lack it.) Obama’s reelection is important to me. It feels legitimizing, not just for his success, but for my own conception of the country I live in.

Mitt Romney abounds in a presidential self-delusion. He portrays himself as a good man always doing the right thing, but I bet he actually sees himself as the right man doing the best thing. I kinda like that. It means he’s persuadable.

Romney’s concession speech is purely characteristic: He can’t hide his shock and indignance at losing something that seemed rightfully his, but he doesn’t let those impulses get in the way of his sense of decorum and duty.

The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this, we can't risk partisan bickering and political posturing. Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people's work. And we citizens also have to rise to the occasion.

2016 (30 years old)

I toss and turn that night. I hardly sleep. I feel personally responsible. The morning after, I buy bagels for everyone in my office. Everyone in the bagel shop stares blankly and despondently. I feel sick.

This is the year I learn being pro-democracy is a political position. I used to think democracy was the universal buy-in. I assumed we all embraced the virtues and foibles of governing ourselves, and that we all insisted there’s no better way to do it. Actually, I kinda thought that was the whole point — the point of having a country in the first place. What else could possibly keep this all together?

It’s easy to forget the brutality of the alternatives. When some people hear “I alone can fix it,” it’s received as a bold new idea, as though we haven’t already tried it. Maybe they forget (or never knew) how people toil for years and years just to be allowed into the nosebleed section of our democracy’s ancient, painstakingly retrofitted colosseum. Otherwise, they might rationalize that such people’s struggles are somehow self-inflicted and unduly burdensome to the rest of us, making those struggles something that should be extracted from their own concerns. Such a mindset bolsters the illusion that struggles and concerns were simpler and fewer back in some hazy version of a preferred yesteryear. Our collective memory falters under the weight of their aggrieved impatience. An unscrupulous man doesn’t need much more than bluster and shamelessness to take advantage of it. Once that pathology is provoked, it’s hard to convince its nascent devotees that any other possibility is acceptable. The machine isn’t working anymore, they say. Let’s see if this calamitous vulgarian can restore it to the original factory settings.

Electing a woman is just one step too far in reinforcing our noble lie. False nostalgia beats hopeful thinking.

Hillary Clinton, dressed in black, delivers a concession speech worthy of being our last.

Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don't just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things; the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them.

2020 (34 years old)

I’m a nervous ball of nerves, but I’m hopeful. I’m hoping that being a mean-spirited dolt during a protracted crisis touching every facet of American life is a losing strategy for an incumbent president. I’m hoping that most people (at least a sizable enough majority) think it’s alarming for our leader to get up in front of TV cameras, ask a room full of doctors and public health experts why no one has ever tried putting bleach in their bodies to kill viruses, look around at all the gaping expressions of disbelief, and convey self-satisfaction for coming up with such a brilliant scientific breakthrough on the fly.

This is the dumbest election of my lifetime. I want this to be a civic discussion among earnest candidates making competing cases about their visions for the best way forward in our system of self-governance. Oh how wonderfully invigorating that would be, to hear good-faith debate rooted in honest interpretations of a shared set of facts. But these men aren’t even applying for the same job. One man wants to be a president, and the other man wants to be a dictator. Would you rather have a dictator or a president? That is the choice. If you don’t like that choice and want a better choice in the future, vote for the guy who doesn’t dismiss all other choices as illegitimate.

Fundamentally, the choice between a dictator and a president is an argument over the validity of math. Do you believe that math is real? Well, one of the two choices categorically rejects any reality where he loses an election based on the number of votes he receives. This defies our traditional understanding of basic arithmetic, which is what we have used to count circles around names since our country was in Kindergarten. Instead, the anti-math choice believes any number that’s bigger than his number isn’t a real number, because he always has the biggest, most beautiful numbers. If he’s reelected, he says we won’t need math anymore.

Therefore, I will be voting for the other choice, whom adheres to the harsh but widely accepted rules that govern the counting of numbers. Where do you stand on math?

Our new dichotomy is as horrible as it is dull.

When the results start slowly crawling in, it’s dismaying. Mercifully, the anti-math choice appears to be losing, despite his claims to the contrary. But man, I have a feeling this fight over math-based elections won’t be over anytime soon.

Late that night, Joe Biden gives an update on the vote tallies to a field of honking cars. He tells us to be patient. We have to wait until all the votes are counted — exactly the sort of pro-math rhetoric that plays to his base.

We can know the results as early as tomorrow morning. But it may take a little longer. As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election. That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.

2024 (38 years old)

It’s gonna be weird no matter what, guys. I’m really sorry about that. But whatever happens, I know it won’t end here, I know I have to keep standing up for what’s right, and I know I won’t be alone.

-Ryan

Click Roulette

The below links match one of the two descriptions provided for each. Click at your own peril!

CLICK HERE FOR LINK ONE. This is either:
- A full-length feature musical about the life and times of the Hawk Tuah girl.
- The entire 2001 animated feature “Shrek,” compressed into a single GIF file.
CLICK HERE FOR LINK TWO. This is either:
- A 14-minute country ballad about the dangers of high cholesterol.
- A 4-minute radio story about a turtle whisperer in New Jersey.
CLICK HERE FOR LINK THREE. This is either:
- A series of recipes in which the only ingredients are mustard and candy corn.
- A rat driving a tiny car.

Wish fulfillment

My sincere apologies to Adelyn B., whose response to the first edition of the Ryan Email Club went unnoticed until last week. Adelyn says initially she was under the impression that my inaugural newsletter was spam from budget airline Ryanair. She opened the email anyway, so I suspect there was a politely unexpressed disappointment in the outcome. I am sorry.

To placate Adelyn’s disappointment, here are the hottest Ryanair deals I found. Fare for each of these one-way flights is currently a low low price of 13.97 pounds sterling. Visit Ryanair.com for details.

London (STN) to Bergamo (BGY)
Mon 27 Jan
London (STN) to Milan (MXP)
Sun 12 Jan
Birmingham (BHX) to Derry (LDY)
Mon 06 Jan
Edinburgh (EDI) to Knock (NOC)
Sat 11 Jan
Derry (LDY) to Birmingham (BHX)
Sat 25 Jan

Tortoise pic of the week

Wordle hint (SPOILER)

As a starting word, WordleBot scores PENIS as an 85 out of 99 in skill level. Someday, this savvy starting word will be the word of the day.

Eavesdrop of the week

“Most dogs look happy all the time. Not this dog. This dog never looks happy.”

— Seattle woman showing another Seattle woman a photo of a pug