Sometime in the weeks leading up to the 1980 presidential election, I overheard a conversation in which someone asked my dad who he was voting for. My dad shrugged his shoulders. "The Asshole," he said. The other guy agreed that, yeah, you didn't have much choice in this election. The Asshole was the only way to go.

When election day rolled around, my teacher decided to illustrate the democratic process by letting us vote in class. When I received my ballot, I thought about the conversation I'd overheard. Of the candidates on the ballot, which one was "The Asshole"? There were always political discussions going on in our house. I wanted to go home and proudly report that not only did I get to vote in class, but I also voted for the Asshole, as any good American undoubtedly would.

Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, didn't seem like much of an Asshole to me. He had a nice smile, and a soft voice, a lot like Mister Rogers. He seemed like a kind and benevolent man. There was no way that he could be the Asshole I was looking for.

I didn't know much about Ronald Reagan. I knew he was an actor, but I'd never seen any of his movies. He did have somewhat of an assholic look about him. The thing was, I hadn't heard his name much around the house. It seemed that if he truly was the Asshole that my dad wanted to run the free world, that there would have been more talk about him in the Chase residence. Still, he could be the Asshole. I wasn't sure.

John Anderson was running as an Independent. I thought this was funny, because there was a guy named John Anderson who lived across the alley from us. When he and his wife went on vacation, I'd get a dollar for letting out their dog and filling his food dish. But I understood that that was just a name, and despite its similarity to the name of someone I liked, that didn't mean he wasn't an Asshole. I also understood however -- even at that young age -- that a third-party candidate has no chance of winning. I concluded that even though John Anderson might be an asshole, he wasn't the Asshole.

I voted for Ronald Reagan.

That night when the results were rolling in, and Reagan was winning every state in the union except for Minnesota, my dad's pure, raging disgust made it obvious that Ronald Reagan was not the correct choice. It turned out that Jimmy Carter was the Asshole I should have voted for. Politics was a lot more difficult to understand than I'd imagined.I felt like I'd let both my family and my country down.

A few years later, the stupidity of my choice became real to me. Ronald Reagan and his cronies loved to deregulate things, and one of the things they deregulated was children's television. Suddenly, all my favorite cartoons like Superfriends were replaced by cartoons that were literally just ads for toys. There was one cartoon called Rubik, the Amazing Cube. I stopped watching cartoons, not because I was too old to enjoy them, but because none of them were good anymore. Like I'm going to watch a fricken Rubik's Cube with a face on it run around and doing magic.

Carter might have been an Asshole. But at least he never messed with cartoons. That's just evil.