Competing yard signs show Vancouver family’s friendly split on election

The Martin family, from left, Jennifer, voting for Obama, Susan, leaning toward Obama, and Richard, strongly behind McCain, enjoy friendly debate about the upcoming election. (Steven Lane/The Columbian)

Jennifer Martin isn’t willing to disclose who it was that might have drawn the curly little mustache on the full-color printout of Sarah Palin that her dad hung on the family’s fridge last weekend.

Or the voice bubble, emerging from the Alaska governor’s mouth, that says, “I want your moose.”

But Martin, 18, is happy to confess that putting a second political sign in the front yard was her idea.

“I didn’t want our house to represent one side,” she said.

Then the Salmon Creek teen, a student at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, smiled.

“Because it doesn’t.”

Her father Richard, 54, has never been undecided about the Nov. 4 election. He cast his first vote in Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide and has been a staunch Republican ever since.

But when he came home Oct. 18 with a McCain-Palin yard sign, Richard Martin didn’t expect the symbolic cross-yard rumble that developed.

It wasn’t that he was unaware of his daughter’s developing sympathies. They’d spent the last month watching the presidential debates together.

Still, coming home from a second errand that afternoon to find that his sign now shared the lawn with a gleaming white Obama-Biden sign made him laugh.

It was just in time for the Halloween party they were planning to host that evening. His daughter had even found a costume for the McCain sign: two little red horns.

Jennifer had conspired to complete the prank with her then-undecided mother, Susan. The next day, when former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama, Susan Martin decided she, too, would be swinging Democratic this year.

Richard Martin said he’s used to it. In 32 years of marriage, they’ve only occasionally agreed on national politics.

The family’s ballots are still blank, waiting for them to finish doing research on all the local races.

The Martins regularly talk politics around the house, but Richard said he’s always taken care to let his daughters make their own decisions.

“I’m easygoing,” said Richard, who works for Vancouver engineering firm MacKay & Sposito.

Being vocally outvoted, though, is new. His older daughter, Nova, tends to keep her opinions to herself.

Richard says he sometimes hopes their dog, Kyp, is a closet Republican.

Anyway, this isn’t as bad as the time two friends surreptitiously decorated his garage with a huge Gore-Lieberman 2000 banner and stuck Democratic pins into the shoelaces of his tennis shoes, among other places.

Jennifer admitted that she’d been inspired in part by her memory of that event.

For his part, Richard said his wife and daughter might want to be on the lookout for further incidents of free expression.

“You never know what might happen,” he said, with a smile of his own.