Talking war across the political divide
I‘m sitting in the cafeteria at Ponderosa Elementary with my column regular, NASCAR Dad, aka John Ward, of Rathdrum. He and four other firefighters with Kootenai County Fire and Rescue have popped into the school to listen to second-graders practice reading. Now they’re staying around for lunch.
We’re talking politics. Two of the firefighters are for Bush, two are for Kerry and one is on the fence. John and I poll the four second-graders sitting across the table from us. Here’s how they would vote were the election held tomorrow — Bush, Bush, Bush and Bush.
Mike Bass, a firefighter sitting among the second-graders, shrugs his shoulders and says to me: “You are in Idaho.”
I am. John Ward has graciously agreed to let me bug him about once a month until November to talk politics and other stuff. NASCAR Dads are the “it” demographic this election season. As they go, so goes the election, some analysts believe.
Look at a map of the United States. See how far Miami is from Seattle? That’s how far apart John and I are in our political views. When the president appears on TV, I avert my eyes, because he makes me so nervous. John Kerry gives NASCAR Dad the total whim-whams. But John and I have fun swapping political views, and we’ve found lots of ground common.
I met up with John at Fire Station 1 in Post Falls on a recent Monday. He’s the lieutenant there. John and I sat in his office and talked about Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq.
“He’s doing a good job,” John said. “But no one’s giving him half a chance.”
While I believe we need to give the Iraqis two weeks’ notice and hightail it home, John believes we need to get more aggressive in Iraq.
“Every time they dance on a burned-out Humvee, I’d like to see us drop a sidewinder (missile) on them,” he said. “The U.S. Marine Corps is not a police department. They are a fighting machine. Their purpose and training is to fight a war. They are not being allowed to do that.”
Time to go to Ponderosa Elementary in Post Falls. The firefighters volunteer in the school once a week. As they walk into the second-grade classroom, the children cheer. One child shouts out: “I want the one with the glasses!” He means Rick Clutter, the captain.
The children line up, books in hand, and follow the firefighters to the library. They split up into small groups, one firefighter per table. The children read aloud a book titled “Born to Rope.” They trace each sentence with their fingers and pronounce their Ts crisply. They stumble over some of the words. John, who sometimes has a tough-guy exterior, noticeably softens. “This story’s got some tough words in it,” the father of two says in a reassuring voice.
This is what a compassionate conservative looks like. Exactly like a compassionate liberal.
After pizza lunch, paid for by Bryon Smith because it’s his turn to cook, we ride back to the station. John and the others work 24-hour shifts, which translates to about 10 nights a month away from home. John shows me the kitchen, the sleeping dorm, the work-out room.
The guys in Fire Station 1 are a tight-knit group who joke together and don’t talk about politics that much. But in an impromptu discussion by the firetrucks, they all seem to agree with Brett Tisdale, who says, “We are dying for a hero. A true, honest American. I’d like someone to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I messed up.’ ”
A week after my day at the fire station, I call John. Someone had really messed up at Abu Ghraib prison. I’m hoping the prison-torture scandal will hasten our exit from hell. This was … the view from Miami. I wanted to hear from Seattle. John didn’t disappoint.
“You have a few people who are vigilantes and taking things into their own hands and overstepping their bounds,” he said. “That’s unfortunate. But it’s really silly that they are trying to pin it on (Donald) Rumsfeld. Yeah, he’s the secretary of defense, but it would be like demanding that the president of a company be fired because someone on the warehouse floor did something wrong.”