The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.
I doubt if anyone under the age of 60 grasps the impact of All in the Family when it debuted on CBS in 1971. This wasn’t Punky Brewster or Manimal. Archie Bunker was a malaprop-tripping, outer-borough (Queens), blue-collar union-man paterfamilias given to bigoted asides and (thanks to actor Carroll O’Connor) perfectly timed double-takes. Whatever Lear’s satiric intentions, Archie became a beloved character during the show’s heyday, before it descended into stupid laugh-track moralizing.
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