By Bob Gaydos
A colleague with whom I spent 29 years carefully avoiding talking politics died the other day. In my sorrow at her passing, I contemplated what it would be like talking politics with her today.
She would have hated it.
Barbara Bedell was a prominent fixture at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, NY, when I started working there in 1978. She was an even more prominent fixture when I retired from the newspaper 29 years later.
She remained another 10 years, cranking out her daily column of news you can't find in local papers today. Fund-raisers, charities, non-profits, civic organizations, the stuff that makes a community. Names, names, names. Everyone wanted their name or their group mentioned in Barbara's column.
I worked at a desk next to hers for about a decade. It offered handy access to the famous Bedell candy dish and was close enough to share gossip.
Barbara knew a lot of people. But she also knew about being discreet and had learned to reconcile her somewhat conservative political views with the decidedly liberal views offered daily on the paper's editorial page, editorials written for the most part by me.
I knew she was a longtime, loyal registered Republican, a Ronald Reagan Republican, from her proud roots in Annapolis to stops in South Dakota and Poughkeepsie. She often donated to Republican political campaigns, but she never let her political preferences influence who was mentioned in her column. Or who was not. She played it straight.
It was that straight-shooter trait I remembered when I ran into Barbara four years after I had retired. I was working on a column for my blog and the 2012 presidential campaign was in full swing.
Not having talked politics in a while, I asked, in total innocence, "What do you think of the presidential candidates your party is offering?"
She did not disappoint.
"It is absurd, insulting. None of them is qualified. It's embarrassing. Obama is going to win in a landslide. I couldn't vote for any of them."
"Not even Romney?"
"No."
"But how did this happen? How did this gang become the Republican Party's best and brightest?"
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