In my past two cartoons, I've been taking themes from previous Everyday Citizen posts and just putting them in cartoon form. The post that this cartoon is based on is here .

When I was young I used to play basketball with my friends and afterwards argue about which player was the better player and which team is the better team. Nowadays when people think of basketball in the 1980s, they think of the great Lakers/Celtics rivalry. In the basketball court where I played though, most of my friends were fans of Doctor J and the 76ers, and I really don't remember there being any Laker fans. My brothers and I were and still are Celtics fans and our favorite player was Larry Bird. So my friends and I would always get into arguments as to whether Bird was better than Doc or was the Doctor better than Bird. We all shared a certain disdain for Magic and Kareen and the Lakers. I didn't really appreciate Magic Johnson until the Lakers played the Detroit Pistons in the late 1980s of Isaiah Thomas and Bill Lambeir. My brothers and I despised Lambier.

One of my fondest memories was arguing about politics with my dad. It would be in the kitchen and while my dad was preparing dinner, I would ask him questions and try to persuade him to being more liberal. In 1984, I remember really long conversations with him about the presidential elections between Mondale and Reagan. I couldn't vote yet, so it was imperative for me to try to get my dad to vote for Mondale. When Mondale said that he would raise taxes to reduce the $200 billion deficit that accrued during Reagan's first term, he basicly lost my dad's vote. My dad's views of the Democrats were influenced by Jimmy Carter, the 12 percent inflation and 19 percent interest rates, and the rising prices every time my parents went to shop for groceries. It still influences my dad's views of the Democrats today.

My view of Reagan was fairly negative at the time. I didn't like the rising gap between the rich and the poor that resulted from his policies, and the growing numbers of homeless people walking the streets. He was funding the contras in El Salvador and putting MX missiles in Europe. And he was putting money in a Star Wars space defense program that would've been better spent helping the poor in the U.S. I always liked Reagan as a person, but I thought his policies were bad for our country in 1984. Many years later, my views on Reagan's policies have softened somewhat. I liked his pursuit of nuclear arms reductions with Gorbachev. And he made America feel good about itself again, after Vietnam and Watergate and the Iranian hostage ordeal, which was a good thing.

I used to have conservative friends that I would talk politics with and we'd be able to disagree and still respect each other. Sometime in the mid 1990s that changed. I'm not sure what happened. I had a conversation with a friend recently and he told me that Fox News had a bad effect on those type of conversations. I don't know if that's true or not, or if people are more open to different views in their 20s and their views harden when they hit their 30s or 40s. Or maybe the political climate is more sharp. Nowadays it's a given that most liberals hate George Bush. But I remember in the 1990s how conservatives hated Bill Clinton with equal vehemence.

When I look at the ex Presidents, I notice how they reach out to each other as friends. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were close friends who had a falling out in the 1790s because of their political differences. But after both had retired from politics, they renewed their friendship and started a wonderful correspondence in which they discussed their differences.

I read somewhere that Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford became friends after a trip to Egypt to attend the funeral of Anwar Sadat. They would correspond and help each other out. In this decade, Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush became friends as they tried to raise funds to help disaster victims. One of Ted Kennedy's closest friends in the Senate is Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah. In the 1990s, Hatch had a talk with Kennedy that got him to finally deal with his drinking problems. These people probably still deeply disagree about the issues. But they can also be friends as well.

Today Obama is trying to create a new spirit of bipartisanship in this country and I respect his attempts to reach across the aisles to Republicans and those who disagree with him on various issues. It'll be tough though. I read that Obama's stimulus package passed the House without a single Republican vote. That doesn't mean that Obama should stop trying to reach out, only realize that it'll take time.

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper's Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage