"Douglas Friedman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in part: >>Mostly, it doesn't >>honestly matter when politicians run for office when the expediency of >>knowing >>that they live in a largely Democrat or Republican State. For those >>seriously >>wishing to win a race, they most likely will shift at a moments notice to
>>the >>Party that would most likely win, and spend a lot of corporate big bucks in >>doing so. >Sure, if there's a one-party area, I can understand that. Thus in New York >City, a conservative like Dov Hikind (maybe Bob Goodman will correct me on >this) I would if I knew any better, but I don't, you're right AFAIK. > always ran as a Democrat. Elsewhere, I think he would have been >Republican. But that wasn't my point. Even in contested areas, people who >are liberals pose as conservative Republicans, sometimes for decades. Then, >when they no longer are running for anything, "out" themselves as liberals. But there are sometimes other ways to game the system. Michael Bloomberg, a rich guy, changed enrollment to Republican to run for mayor of NYC. That was so he could avoid a Democratic primary and put his money directly to use with the same message all the way thru the general election. (He got the GOP nomination uncontested.) He's running for re-election as nominee of the Republican and Independence parties, and in addition got a Liberal ballot label via petition. (The Liberals were for a half century an official party, but now it's an independent label.) This time he faces the very weak winner of the Democratic primary, Ferrer, who is being enormously outspent and trailing about 2-1 in the polls. >Of course, Hawaii, like Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and New York, >has a Republican governor. And Democrats have won in states like Wyoming and >Utah. Odd that people are more willing to vote for a member of the opposite >party for governor than for legislator. See the pattern? The top of the ticket goes a highly disproportionate amount of the time to the opposite party, even in cases where they don't have Bloomberg's bucks. The NYC council is almost exclusively Democratic, but the last 2 mayors have been enrolled Republicans. In Massachusetts the GOP has crumbled to almost nothing (from a position that was very weak to begin with) while holding the governorship, basically because the governors have run away from the party. I'll bet that's the case in Hawaii too. It was probably a situation wherein someone got the GOP nomination easily, albeit without grass roots support within that party, bypassing a competitive Democratic primary and thus having a relatively easy path to victory. >But 10 years from now, when [elected officials] retire, will >they suddenly decide they're >liberals after all? Maybe not since even here no one will care what they >think once they're out of office, but look at how many nationally known >politicians spend whole careers as tax cutters, spending hawks, etc. only to >switch sides after retiring. My point is that it seems that nearly all >politicians are really liberals, only some of them pose as conservatives or >libertarians to win. Interesting. I haven't seen that much evidence for it because I (like most people, I guess) don't pay much att'n to retired pols. Around here, sometimes they retire first to jail! Maybe you could supply some examples we'd be likely to know of. The repositioning that bothers me most lately has been that of Michael LeBron, whom some of you may know as radio personality "Lionel". Used to be libertarian, now he's very obviously "liberal". Never a politician, though. A few years previously, radio personality Jay Diamond repositioned himself from quasi-"conservative" to socialist, with particular opposition to libertarianism (explicitly), which he saw as being in command of society. I don't think I've ever followed a rightward shift in a broadcast personality's positioning, although Howard Stern has long alleged that Bob Grant's positioning on the "right" was adopted and disingenuous. Truly I So Briney, Robert _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list Libnw@immosys.com List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
