Open Call: Pitch Reels

The Pitch:

In November of 1968, my father cast his first vote in a Presidential Election for Democrat Hubert Humphrey. That same year, he joined the National Guard to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. In the summer of 1969 he and 3,000 other Guardsmen were sent in to occupy the UC Berkeley campus during the People's Park protests. At the time he was unambiguously opposed to the war in Vietnam, and he disliked Governor Ronald Reagan for what he believed to be an inappropriate deployment of the Guard. In his off-duty hours, he would change out of his uniform and participate in the same peace demonstrations he'd been assigned to police.

My father continued to vote Democratic for many years after that, and he held on to such a resentment toward Reagan that in 1980 he threatened to leave the country if he were elected President. But by the end of Reagan's second term, something had changed. In 1988, my father voted for George H.W. Bush. Ever since then, he's been an active and loyal Republican. He's been elected to local office as a Republican four times. He worked for Bob Dole's campaign in 1996. He was a delegate for George W. Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention, and he's currently a state co-chair of the John McCain campaign.

Is it possible that in 35 years I could look back fondly on George W. Bush? Sometimes I start to worry that I might someday undergo a similar transformation. My dad once hated Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and now they're two of his heroes. I've never quite understood why his beliefs changed so dramatically. And I've never been able to figure out how a person who was fervently against the Vietnam War could grow up to be such an ardent supporter of the current war in Iraq.

”Republican Dad” will interweave an interview with my dad with archival photos documenting his conversion from Democrat to Republican. The interview will focus on past Presidential elections as well as the one coming up this fall. I'll try to get him to explain why his political beliefs have changed so much over the years. I'll ask him whether he sees any parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, or between Nixon and Bush. The story of his political conversion from liberal to conservative will be illustrated with a series of photographs of him over the last four decades: We'll see him as a boy on his parents' farm, then as a National Guardsman at Berkeley, and later as a long-haired and bearded hippie. We'll see him as a young professional, a newlywed, a father of two young boys, and finally as a Republican politician, posing with George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and John McCain.