First political event you remember

[Bacon King]

2000: I was one out of three kids in my Kindergarten class to "support" Gore.

I remember 2004 very clearly and watched election returns all night. I cried when Kerry lost.

You know you're getting old, when...

Oh wow. People who were born in 1999 will be old enough to join the forum this year.

[batmacumba]

2000: I was one out of three kids in my Kindergarten class to "support" Gore.

I remember 2004 very clearly and watched election returns all night. I cried when Kerry lost.

You know you're getting old, when...

Don't tell me. My first is the brasilian amnesty...

[Joe Biden 2020]

I was born in 1982, and the first one I remember is Bush v. Dukakis 1988.

[LastVoter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrkonji%C4%87_Grad_incident
I was just a little over 3.

[Joe Biden 2020]

I was born in 1982, and the first one I remember is Bush v. Dukakis 1988.

Actually, I take that back.  It was the 1986 mid-terms when Former Governor and Senator Henry Bellmon (R) won the Oklahoma Governor's Race for the second time.  He became a Grover Cleveland type Governor in that he served two non-consecutive terms.  I do remember Ron Paul and Joe Biden in the 1988 primaries and remember the 1988 RNC and President Reagan's famous line "Win one for the Gipper."  I remember quite a bit about Reagan's second term and Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin.

Specifically, in the 1988 Primaries and again in the 1992 primaries, I kept wondering why the candidates won every week or why different candidates would win different weeks.

I really do feel old now, because some of these kids on this forum were in Kindergarten or younger when I cast my first vote for Texas Governor George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential Election (my one and only Republican vote for President).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh wow. People who were born in 1999 will be old enough to join the forum this year.

Don't write that.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I remember 2004 very clearly and watched election returns all night. I cried when Kerry lost.

How old were you back then?

The only time I came close to crying over election results was in the federal election here in May 2011 for pretty obvious reasons. I was sobbing up.

I was 10 but I was also convinced that Bush was evil incarnate and I spent months obsessing over the election.

[Хahar 🤔]

I remember 2004 very clearly and watched election returns all night. I cried when Kerry lost.

How old were you back then?

The only time I came close to crying over election results was in the federal election here in May 2011 for pretty obvious reasons. I was sobbing up.

I was 10 but I was also convinced that Bush was evil incarnate and I spent months obsessing over the election.

I also did this, of course.

[Badger]

My mom was running a bath for me, and there was some hubbub on the news in the other room.  I asked her what it was, and she told me that President Bush had lost an election to a man named Clinton.  I asked her if this was good or bad, and she just shrugged and carried on running the bath.  That shaped a lot of my political outlook right there.

The exact same thing happened to me!

Of course I was 27. Is that odd?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

2000. Gore 'won' my elementary school 63-49-7. The 49 was Nader (I was for Gore). Gotta love Windham County.

[Reaganfan]

My grandfather and uncle yelling about George Bush at my 4th birthday party in October 1992.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

2000. Gore 'won' my elementary school 63-49-7. The 49 was Nader (I was for Gore). Gotta love Windham County.

Awesome.

[k-onmmunist]

9/11 is my earliest memory of any real political significance.

My first actual memory of politics itself was the 2004 US election, and I remember disliking both Bush and Kerry at the time.

[Oakvale]

My earliest clear memory of an American electioin is the 2000 election and my parents being worried that Bush was going to win. I also remember hearing about Clinton on the news a lot, which I guess a lot of was the Lewinsky scandal (1999ish?).

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

I remember in 1996 driving home from dinner with my parents and over the radio at about 9:30 they said "as expected, Clinton wins reelected in a landslide."

2000 was the first election to watched and followed, especially afterwards with all the court proceedings.

[courts]

Either the OK City Bombing or hearing about FARC murdering friends/relatives. Sort of explains a lot, actually.

[freefair]

The 2001 General Election, in particular William Hauge's concession speech being played on Morning TV. I felt very sorry for the man. I also remember my mom bemoaning that Blair had "fooled the public" and that Labour would "ruin the country" after 9 years in power .Maybe that is where it all began.
Of course Hauge is fine now, what with being the 2nd most popular politician in the UK after Salmond.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

the Watergate hearing interrupting my cartoons

[Redalgo]

Voting in a mock elementary school election for Bill Clinton.

[angus]

I remember watergate.  Well, I remember that Nixon was president, and that there were all these news stories about watergate, which in my six-year-old mind was something to keep out floods, like maybe on a river or a bay.  What Nixon was doing to the watergate was mystifying me, and I'd imagined him blocking it, so that there was a flood, or maybe not blocking it, so a pond would run dry, something like that, and it was very disturbing that the president would do such a thing.

Then we moved to Germany for a year, and Helmut Schmidt was the Bundeskanzler.  (Helmet, in my mind.)  Helmet was an appropriate name for a German Kanzler, because I was familiar with Hogan's Heroes, and the fact that Germans loved their helmets, putting big spikes on them.  Apparently, the big spike was a place to hang one's combination cap.  Helmet must have had a big spike on his.  He was the Bundeskanzler, after all, and that's sort of like being President.  In my mind, he sort of always looked like Paul von Hindenburg, with a big spike on his big, black warhat, and a big porn star mustache.  You can imagine my disappointment when I actually first saw Helmet on the television.  

When we returned to the United States, a man named Ford had become president.  Not long after that, there was an election, and I remember that I saw a Ford sticker on a Chevy, a Carter sticker on a Ford, and a Dole sticker on a banana.  It was all very confusing.

[angus]

I remember that I saw a Ford sticker on a Chevy, a Carter sticker on a Ford, and a Dole sticker on a banana.  It was all very confusing.

'
I feel like I've heard someone say the exact same thing... strange.

Haha.  Yeah, I've posted that many times on this forum.  It was from a show that was popular for a while in my youth.  I think it might have been from Maude.  What was her husband's name?  I forget, anyway, I think it was Maude's husband who said it.

It was a long time before I really understood Watergate, though.  It really was something to do with controlling a flood, for me.  I think in our high school textbooks there was a mention of some documents being stolen and a hotel room being bugged, and then I started to sort it all out.  By that time, I was in the 9th grade, and Helmut Schmidt was succeeded by Helmut Kohl, of course.  How cool is that?

[Brittain33]

Really young: asking my mother who the president of NJ was, she said Jimmy Carter, and my older sister yelled in from the other room that it was now Reagan.

I think I remember the Falklands War.

After that, nothing until the 1984 election where our scholastic newsletter had Mondale saying he made history by choosing a woman for VP, which I thought was cool, but didn't matter, because I like everyone else was a Republican because "Republicans are good for the economy."

[Reaganfan]

My school election in 2000 was so close they counted the votes again. Bush won twice.

[You kip if you want to...]

Probably Diana dying and Tony Blair giving some form of amazing response to it. I was a big Blair fan as a kid. I remember hearing of the country Kosovo a lot around when I was 4-5. I remember John Prescott punching that guy. I remember waking up to see the 2001 results on GMTV. And I remember thinking IDS and Ian Hislop were the same person.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I feel slightly ashamed that I can't remember Clinton as President.