This lady represents what I most abhor about American politics: blind loyalty to a political party.

With the midmorning light pouring through the window above her, the 106-year-old woman lies in the front bedroom with a red, white and blue afghan draped over her.

The colors are appropriate. She is perhaps the only woman in middle Tennessee or North Alabama who has voted in every local election since 1921, the year after the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote.

Pearl Weaver and her family also believe that she’s the eldest resident of the area, maybe the state.

“Tell them who you vote for,” says the woman leaning over her bed. “Tell them you’re a Democrat.”

The woman is one of her two caregivers. The other is Shirley Curtis, the owner of the frame house on Third Avenue in downtown Winchester.

“Yeah, I’m a Democrat,” Weaver says.

“Tell them when you first voted,” the caregiver says.

“When I was 21,” Weaver says. “I’ve voted since I was 21.”

Given her age and her politics, her roster of presidential candidates has ranged from James W. Davis, the Democratic nominee in the 1924 presidential election, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Dealer, to John Kerry.

She also has voted in 17 gubernatorial elections and more than 30 U.S. Senate elections. She still remembers the first time she voted - at a school in Marble Plains, just west of Winchester.

“One of her favorite stories is about her being the first woman in Franklin County to vote,” says Jack Hice, the preacher at the Baptist church in Marble Plains, where Weaver was born and lived for most of her life.

Weaver is unable to remember whom she voted for in 1921 - only that she voted for a Democrat.

“When I asked why she voted that way, she said it was because her daddy told her to,” Hice says. “She said, ‘He told me the Democrats were for the poor, and the Republicans were for the rich.’ ”

Even now, she still votes.

“My neighbors brought me” a ballot, she says. “I voted this year, too.”

But in 86 years of voting, she has never voted for a Republican.

“Not that I know of,” she says. “I always thought the Democrats were for everybody.”

I’m certainly impressed by Ms. Weaver’s longevity, but I am wholly unimpressed by her admitted lack of educated voting.  She started off her civic life by voting for whom she was told to vote for and never turned back.  That is not a trait to be admired.  This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing.  Its people like her that keep crooked politicians ensconced in their positions.

Once, a man was encouraging my dad to run for an elected county office.  My dad said that he had thought about it, but if he did he was going to run as a Republican (he said that because he knew his friend was an ardent Democrat).  His friend - the man who just moments before had been encouraging him to run - said, “Well, I can’t vote for you then.”  It is refreshing to see people thinking for themselves!

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This entry was posted by Brian on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under Politics, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.