A BoomerPdx reminder for millennial voting.

The biggest block of potential voters hit the polls this month.

Is millennial voting up to the task? Are they ready for the burden they’ll strap on with the wrong vote?

Look at the elderly man in the picture, also known as President Harry S. Truman.

Why the huge smile? He wasn’t supposed to win.

The next President of the United States of America was supposed to be Thomas Dewey, who lost presidential races in 1940, 1944, and now 1948.

Elections are tricky things toward the end, which is where we are in the 2016 race.

Dear Millennials, why not make this the race you sway for the first time?

You’ll be glad you did as long as you vote.

Dewey was an inside operator during WWII.

As a New York District Attorney, and Governor of New York, his jails were full of Mafia guys who could help with invasions in Sicily and Italy.

He was a player, and players like to win. Again, elections turn on the strangest of things.

Millennial voting would have lined up with Dewey or Truman. Which one would you take?

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1952: Eisenhower or Stephenson?

One was the Supreme Allied Commander of WWII, the other a career politician.

Millennial voting for the King of the World, Eisenhower, would have added to the landslide he won in 1956, which brings us to the kids running in 1960, Nixon and Kennedy.

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Baby Boomers are all older than Nixon or Kennedy.

Nixon and Kennedy kids are older than millennials.

If you look at pictures of those two candidates, millennials aren’t that much younger.

The choice then was vision or more of the same. Kennedy’s vision included going to the moon.

Millennial voting goes for the handsome Kennedy, or the glowering Nixon.

Today we know more about each of them, even with JFK’s short first term.

Back then the race was the closest in history.

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1964

Hippies weren’t making noise yet. Beats were snapping their fingers to poetry.

Texas Lyndon Johnson landslided Arizona’s Barry Goldwater.

Look at the two men. Which one would millennial voting push?

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1968

Here comes Nixon, a man who quit politics because he felt pushed around by the media.

LBJ quit on politics, saying he wouldn’t run, and if elected, wouldn’t serve.

So his Vice President stood up.

Young people said they hated Nixon, everything about him.

Then he won the biggest landslide in 1972 just to show them who’s running things, only to resign his presidency in 1972 during Watergate.

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Keep looking at the elections to get an idea of millennial voting.

1976 was a backlash against the Republican Party. 1980 through 1992 returned to form with Reagan twice and Bush Sr. once.

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1992

A youthful Bill Clinton carried the vote for two terms.

Al Gore was set for his run, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept the Clinton helpers.

2000

The former VP Gore met Texas Governor George Bush Jr.

In one of those strange elections, voter fraud, family ties, and a third party man in Ralph Nader, played a part.

Young Bush took his two terms, with his VP Dick Cheney standing beside him, guiding him through the night with the light from above.

Or so they’d like you to think.

This man served as a wartime Secretary of Defense.

Out of office during the Clinton Presidency, he ran Halliburton.

He knew the ropes inside and out.

After his initial stints in government under Republican Administrations, including time as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney entered the private sector, where he used contacts he made during his time in government to enrich himself. All told, he would earn more than $44 million from Halliburton.

Jane Mayer has an account of how the relationship began:

Cheney was hired by Halliburton in 1995, not long after he went on a fly-fishing trip in New Brunswick, Canada, with several corporate moguls. After Cheney had said good night, the others began talking about Halliburton’s need for a new C.E.O. Why not Dick? He had virtually no business experience, but he had valuable relationships with very powerful people. Lawrence Eagleburger, the Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration, became a Halliburton board member after Cheney joined the company. He told me that Cheney was the firm’s “outside man,” the person who could best help the company expand its business around the globe. Cheney was close to many world leaders, particularly in the Persian Gulf, a region central to Halliburton’s oil-services business.

Cheney and his wife, Lynne, were so friendly with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., that the Prince had invited the Cheney family to his daughter’s wedding. (Cheney did not attend.) “Dick was good at opening doors,” Eagleburger said. “I don’t mean that pejoratively. He had contacts from his former life, and he used them effectively.”

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Millennial voting needs to consider one thing in regard to history:

Do you want a man like Dick Cheney anywhere near a sitting President? He’s the man Young Bush tasked with finding a suitable Vice President for his administration.

Cheney came back with the ideal candidate for the job: himself.

This is the man current VP candidate Mike Pence says will be his role model should he and Donald Trump win this election over Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.

What sort of advice will Cheney give Pence while President Trump is busy making American great again?

If you want to find that out, vote accordingly.

The other candidate, Hillary Clinton, might have problems, but a man crush on Dick Cheney isn’t one of them.