ONE OF MY EARLIEST POLITICAL memories as a kid growing up in Iowa was standing in a rally for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential run. I still have the photo: my hair cut in a terrible pixie style popular at the time and wearing a loud geometric print shirt, I am holding a "Nixon's the One" sign and looking quite pleased about it.
I was raised in a Republican family with long-held Midwestern Methodist traditions of fiscal responsibility and honesty coupled with a strong social conscience. My grandfather, a respectable commercial real estate businessman who never drank and counted a U.S. Supreme Court Justice among his friends, walked in the voting booth every other November, pulled the Republican lever to vote a straight party-line ticket, and walked out.
We visited the White House when I was a teen-ager and attended a reception for the Shah of Iran, oblivious to the Watergate hearings going on at the same time. In college I worked on George H.W. Bush's first presidential campaign. It never occurred to me to be anything other than a Republican.
And then, three years later, I moved to California. Surrounded by liberal Democrats in my second newspaper job, I remember wearing an elephant-nose disguise one election night just to annoy my fellow reporters. Snorting with disgust, my desk mate stalked off and complained to our editor. But I was given a reprieve by the advertising manager, a stalwart GOP fan who used to give me free Lakers tickets.
I was a rebel! The only Republican reporter in this little California newsroom.
AND THEN THE WORLD began to change around me. President Ronald Reagan ran up huge deficits. Iran-Contra happened. Oliver North and his pals were indicted. The stock market dropped precipitously, blamed partially on rising deficits. Newt Gringrich came into power and criticized Reagan for compromising with Democrats. The poison pen of William Kristol began to influence public policy. Tom DeLay exacted political vengeance. And the 1994 election handed Republicans a heady victory of control of both houses and no reason to ever compromise again.
The tone and hypocrisy disgusted me. I found that I had very little in common with this new wing of the GOP. By the time my grandfather died in 1994, I was a Democrat.
Eight years of rule under Project for a New American Century-inspired neoconservatism left me even more certain I had made the right decision.
I THOUGHT OF THIS TODAY as I learned Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania left the Republican Party to become a Democrat. Part of a triumvirate of Northeastern Republican senators which included Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, they were the last holdouts of the "Rockefeller Republican" era.
While my progressive friends sometimes mock my stuffy Midwestern values, I have found that differences of opinion are far more accepted within the Democratic Party, allowing moderates like Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia to thrive, while the Specters of the world are becoming politically extinct on the other side of the aisle.
We didn't leave the GOP. The GOP left us.
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