I support Elizabeth Warren because, according to the NYT puff piece, she used to be a Republican.

[NNadir]

It was in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. It's unsurprising in a sense, that she was once a Republican; she was born into the white lower class in Oklahoma.

I am, of course, proud that I have never voted Republican in my life, although once as a kid, I toyed with voting for Jacob Javits in the Senate but didn't, because he was a Republican.

But the point is not about whether I have ever thought that Republican "ideas" - if we can call them that - were worthy of consideration.

The point is that as a young woman, Ms. Warren assumed they were.

But there's this: Elizabeth Warren as an academic researcher began to do research on the premise that people filing for bankruptcies were involved in a kind of credit card scam, living beyond their means and then leaving the banks holding the bag for their high living lifestyle. And in her research she found something she didn't expect; that the majority of bankruptcies involved unexpected medical expenses, lost jobs, other kinds of tragedy.

So she changed her mind. She let go of her hypothesis and engaged the reality she found.

And that's precisely what I want in a President; high intelligence coupled with a flexible mind.

She's traveled a greater distance that I have and I admire this.

I will vote for the Democratic nominee; but I hope it will be Warren, and if not Warren, I hope the person to humiliate that racist sexist piece of crap in the White House will be a woman; and if not a woman, well, I'll take any of the fine candidates we have before us.

But I have surprised myself with this reason for supporting Ms. Warren in the present state. It's something I thought I'd never say.

[yonder]

1. Great comments

I especially liked this:

"So she changed her mind. She let go of her hypothesis and engaged the reality she found. And that's precisely what I want in a President; high intelligence coupled with a flexible mind."

[backtoblue]

2. +1

"She let go of her hypothesis and engaged the reality she found."

[Mme. Defarge]

3. Hillary was a Republican.

Back in the day we were both “Goldwater girls”.

[NNadir]

4. In many ways, painful to reflect upon, it is not just that Trump is so bad, but that Hillary...

...would have been so damned good.

She would have made an outstanding President, but the hate machine, and Putin, did a good job raising trivialities to the absurd state, representing them as major.

[BlueMTexpat]

5. + a million or so!

[betsuni]

6. She was a teenager, never voted for a Republican.

How can you be a Republican if you've never voted for one?

[Hassin Bin Sober]

10. She was the President of the Young Republicans chapter in college

To her credit, she moved away from the Republican Party during the civil rights movement. Warren was a similar age but stayed during the Nixon absolute corruption, the Reagan insanity, the Bush1 nonsense, and the Gingrich absurdity.

[NNadir]

14. Even if all this were true, it is precisely the point.

Ms. Warren is an older woman, but her mind is young and active.

She's not some senile old fart who's repeated the same damn tired rhetoric year after year after year after year without ever generating a single new idea in sixty years, repeated the same formulaic supercilious slogans like some senile old bastard.

I am an old man myself, and I am powerfully ashamed of what my generation is leaving for all future generations.

I am exhausted with sloganeering, the absurd pretension of moral superiority where there is, in fact, zero such morality to support it.

Speaking as an old fart, I hope that those among us old farts who have nothing creative to say will get out of the way and let people with young minds - new minds, even if they are, in fact in old people - get on with saving what is left to be saved.

I would not expect that what I've just said will make it clear to those attached to historical dogma, but it certainly represents what I think.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

18. That's some real mental gymnastics to say the guy who was right all along is the bad guy.

Last edited Sat Jul 20, 2019, 10:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Some people fought Reaganism tooth and nail. Other people supported it.

Young mind. Oh, ok.

[betsuni]

22. "Some people fought Reaganism tooth and nail"

Bernie Sanders ran for mayor in 1980 and said: "I think probably, I won't swear to it, that the first time I voted was in the state of Vermont, probably for myself." Oh, ok. That's really fighting tooth and nail against Republicans, not voting except voting for yourself.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

23. Yeah, being arrested for civil rights protests and being the chairperson of....

... the university chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), merging with the SNCC, actively working to desegregate housing on campus is just the same as being a Reagan fan/voter.

And yeah, Bernie was Mayor during Reagan’s terms. He was an outspoken critic of Reagan- not a Reagan voter.

But you knew all this.

[betsuni]

24. And after college?

[Hassin Bin Sober]

26. Head start teacher? Psychiatric aid? Filmmaker? Omigod he was a monster!

Again, not a Goldwater fan, not a Reagan fan and not a Republican.

[betsuni]

27. You seem upset.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

29. Lol.

[BannonsLiver]

35. Wait, Bernie was arrested while marching for civil rights?

Gee, I’ve never heard about that before

[NNadir]

28. It would be useful to take a sober look at one of the most important pieces of American History.

In 1860, the moderate candidate, who had only recently joined his political party, held an opinion that most of us, with the possible exception of the orange, uneducated, mentally challenged ass currently in the White House, that human slavery was acceptable where it already existed (in 1860), but that it simply could not be expanded.

Um...um...um.

Of course that person was Abraham Lincoln. To steal a phrase from Shakespeare, "We shall not see his like again."

What made Abraham Lincoln the greatest President we have ever known? His evolution.

Writing of him after the fact the great moral philosopher Frederick Douglass wrote this:

He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government...

...When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave-holders three months’ grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more...

...I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined..

Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln

Italics and bold are mine.

Now, I have read a lot of history, and certainly hundreds of the books written about Lincoln, but no one, absolutely no one, captured him better than that philosopher of morality, Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave.

I am uninterested in the opinion of anyone who thinks that what one held in 1980 should be identical to what one believes in 2019, or that what one thought in 1970 defines who they are in 2019.

I am spectacularly uninterested in what Joe Biden said about busing in the 1970's, or what Kamala Harris did when she was a prosecutor that is inconsistent with our modern values.

The people who appeal to this notion of ersatz ideological purity are classically dogmatic people, with closed minds, of little use to anyone.

Speaking only for myself, if I met who I was in 1970, I would be appalled.

I'm sick of old farts who lack the sobriety and the intellect to have ever changed their ideas. And as I have have implied, if not directly stated, I am unimpressed with supercilious appeals to mindless consistency that weakly attempt to imply some kind of ridiculous moral superiority. There is, in my opinion, at least one candidate in the current field of candidates who would reify my objection, but happily he will not be the nominee, although he will surely prance around claiming that this party is simply not good enough for him.

I, of course, objected to Reagan, which does make me intellectually or morally superior to Ms Warren. Again, I am praising not the idiot dogma of consistency; I am praising flexibility.

Again, it would be useful to be sober enough to read a little history. Abraham Lincoln had all the things (and almost certainly more - I am not saying she is him) that impress me about Elizabeth Warren, high intelligence, a flexible mind, and I would suspect more than many other senile old farts who may or may not come here, the pragmatism to address moral issues in ways that worked.

Pragmatism is defined by the ability to change one's mind, something Lincoln exhibited with what proved, as Douglass wrote, to be great results, and something I certainly would hope and expect a putative President Elizabeth Warren would bring to our country.

[betsuni]

21. How can anyone who has never voted for a Republican be a Republican?

[Celerity]

32. you need to stop spreading disinfo about Warren, you are pushing flat-out falsehoods up and down

this thread. Implying she was a Nixon fan, Reagan voter, blah blah blah. That is simply not true, and misrepresenting other Democrats really is not a good look for your candidate you support. Warren was a registered Republican for around 5 years (1991-1996) and the only Rethug POTUS she voted for was Ford.

She grew up in an FDR Democratic household.

Her first vote the POTUS was AGAINST Nixon in 1972. She did vote for Ford, but liked Carter. She voted Carter in 1980 and Mondale in 1984. In 1988 she voted for Dukakis, and in 1992, Clinton. Obviously voted for Clinton again in 1996 and every other Democrat since then. She registered as a Republican because she had moved to PA and liked Arlen Specter, who also switched to our Party from Republican later on.


1972 McGovern (she detested Nixon)
1976 Ford
1980 Carter (she did not like Reagan)
1984 Mondale
1988 Dukakis
1992 Bill Clinton
1996 (she was now a Democrat) Bill Clinton
2000 Gore
2004 Kerry
2008 Obama
2012 Obama
2016 Hillary Clinton

Her first presidential vote, in 1972, had been cast against a man she said she disliked passionately, Richard Nixon. But reflecting on how little she had paid attention to day-to-day politics at the time, she couldn’t immediately recall who had been running against him. When told it was Democrat George McGovern, she said, Yes, she would have voted for him but didn’t have any specific memory of having done so. (She was living in New Jersey at the time.)

Going to the polls, she said, was nothing new for her. Warren’s mother had been a poll worker and brought her young daughter to the polls each Election Day.

Nixon was re-elected that year, of course, but resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford. Warren said she had voted for him in 1976, believing that “Ford was a decent man.”

But she was happy with Jimmy Carter, who beat him. “I thought he [also] was a decent man,” she said, transferring her then-standard for what she wanted in a politician from Ford to Carter. “He was a really good man.”

As the ’80s wore on and her research on bankruptcy progressed, Warren started waking up politically. At the time, though, the two parties had yet to separate entirely along ideological lines, as some deeply conservative and racist Democrats still held office, as did some genuinely liberal Republicans.

In 1988, Warren voted for Michael Dukakis but, in 1992, split her ticket, voting for Republican Arlen Specter for Senate and Democrat Bill Clinton for president. Specter is a good example of the one-time flexibility of the party system and the politicians within it: He began and ended his career as a Democrat, but was a Republican for much of the middle of it.

By the fall of 1987, she had moved to Pennsylvania and registered there as a Republican. Warren said she couldn’t quite remember why she did it but that she was a fan of Specter. “Again, I thought he was a decent man,” she said. She couldn’t recall whom he ran against. (His Democratic opponent was Lynn Yeakel.)

That GOP registration, though, has set off speculation over the years that one of the Senate’s most progressive champions may have at one time been a Ronald Reagan backer.

So we asked her: Is it true? Is it possible the champion of the regulatory cops on Wall Street voted for the man who made deregulation a hallmark of his presidency?

No.

In 1980, she said, she was a registered independent living in Missouri City, Texas, and cast her vote to re-elect Carter.

When Reagan won, she wasn’t happy but not crushed the way she was on election night in 2016. “I was disappointed and didn’t like him, but I wasn’t deeply worried for the country, not anything like when Trump was elected,” she explained. If she could go back in time, she said, she would tell herself “this was a far more pivotal historical moment than you understand.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/12/elizabeth-warren-profile-young-republican-2020-president-226613

[wyldwolf]

9. and she was the target of many who are now Warren supporters for it

Just sayin'

[mcar]

19. HRC was a teenager

She became a Democrat in college.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. Thank you.

I have on rare occasion voted for a Republican. We are talking back in the very early 1980s. I'm remembering a Gubernatorial race in a state that can remain unnamed. We (my husband and I) looked at the candidates carefully and decided the Republican was the best choice. Can't recall for sure, but I don't think he won. Oh, well.

Here's a better story. We moved to Phoenix, AZ, in the early fall of 1983. There was a mayoral election happening, and it was important because no matter which candidate won, be it the Republican or the Democrat, it would mean a fundamental shift in the power structure that had been running the city since 1948.

Ok. My husband and I both registered to vote, but felt that since we hadn't lived there very long we really didn't know the issues well enough to make an informed choice. Yes, we could have voted for our preferred party, but honestly felt (and keep in mind that this was 1983, very long before the current political dichotomy) felt it made more sense not to vote at all.

On election day my husband was out of town on a business trip with a couple of fellow employees. Oh, and here I must point out that way too many people who move to Phoenix are convinced that so long as you no longer have to shovel snow off your car in winter, nothing else matters. And while I'll agree that it's nice not to have to shovel snow off your car in winter, I also feel that it's not the only marker of quality of life. Okay. The two fellow employees had lived in Phoenix something like seven years and three years. Or maybe nine years and eleven years. It's not important. What matters is that they were of the "So long as I'm not shoveling snow off my car in winter nothing else matters" mindset.

On election night when husband called me, I said, "Oh, by the way, Terry Goddard won the election." Goddard was the Democrat in the race, and it's a genuine shame he never became Governor of the state or held some other higher office. Anyway, the next day when he told his co-workers that Goddard had won the election, they said, "Huh? Who? What election? What are you talking about?"

I understand choosing not to vote, as we did, but I don't understand being that oblivious to what's going on politically in you own city. And those co-workers were not an anomaly. We learned, in our four years in Phoenix, that indifference to local politics was endemic, to say the least.

As an aside, I had lived in Tucson from 1962-1968, and in my four years in Phoenix, 1983-1987, never met anyone who'd arrived in Arizona earlier that I had. For what that is worth.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Republicans weren't always movement conservatives and assholes.

I voted for Jon Anderson in 1980 even though he essentially was a Republican. I didn't like Ronald Reagan who scared me since he tried to primary Gerald Ford in 1976. And even Nixon with Vietnam and Watergate created the EPA and Head Start.

Say what you want, but the Republican Party didn't change after Barry Goldwater. Who knew it would indelibly change with Reagan?

We didn't know when he had it so good.

[ProfessionalLeft]

11. The beginning of the downward spiral

I'm of the opinion that the beginning of the downward spiral began with Reagan. It started with the firing of the air traffic controllers and it's been pretty much a steady downward spiral ever since. The Democratic presidents we've had since Reagan haven't done nearly enough to reverse the damage their predecessors have done. And the election of Biden would be more of the same. A nice guy who wants to work with the other side to "get things done". What he (and Obama) don't and didn't get is that the republicans aren't the opposition anymore; they're the enemy. And you can't work with them; you've got to fight them to the death.

(I didn't mention Clinton because I just never had any use for him. And I'm talking about his politics, not his peccadilloes.)

P.S. Although I am not a Biden supporter and have a number of candidates I would rather see grab the nomination, I will, of course, vote for Biden if he is our nominee.

[no_hypocrisy]

33. Welcome to DU ProfessionalLeft!

[ProfessionalLeft]

38. Thanks, no_hypocrisy

[Kind of Blue]

12. +1000

[DownriverDem]

13. The question is

who can win the electoral college which means state by state? It means winning the middle. I wish folks would focus.

[NNadir]

16. There is a middle?

Maybe, but if so, it's becoming vanishingly small.

The OP is about changing one's mind.

I'm really not into soothsaying. I certainly recall not liking a certain Democratic candidate in 2008 who many people thought could never win an election because he was, um, of African heritage.

I thought that winning was so important that our party was perhaps making a mistake in choosing the candidate who appealed to our hearts rather than the one who was "electable."

That candidate, the best President of my adult life won the election, and the "electable" candidate that year won a later election, but not so strongly as to be awarded the Presidency.

We all like to assume that anyone who voted for Trump is impossibly stupid, but perhaps there are some among them who fit appropriately into that old adage, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people all of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

I think it is disingenuous to translate early polls into triumphant announcements of a path to victory. Were that so, Hillary and not that racist piece of shit, would be in the White House.

I am absolutely convinced that there are undoubtedly some Trump voters in the swing states who feel they have been played for fools and are as mad as hell about it. Not all of them are as stupid as we think. They can see what is happening in their daily lives. Think for a minute on a soybean farmer now facing bankruptcy, a factory worker in Lordstown.

[AlexSFCA]

30. any of our current candidates are MUCH more electable than Obama was in 2008

[NNadir]

31. I agree. n/t.

[Hortensis]

15. A former Republican of good character who becomes a Democrat

out of knowledge and principle has to be far better and more dependable than someone who's always worn the label but lets the Republicans and other hostiles tell him what it means.

Btw, an interesting exercise is taking a cool look at our candidate list and asking which we thought would have always been Republicans if they lived where usually only Republicans get elected. Some are pretty obvious to me. Liberalism is a real thing and some are wired to believe in it and others not. Same for conservative reactions to a changeable and frightening world.

[NNadir]

17. Well said. n/t

[oldsoftie]

20. There would be some great satisfaction seeing WOMAN defeating trump

It may be more than he could take.

[Maxheader]

25. I guess she is as close to my pick as any...

I'll vote for whoever I think can pull in the same voters as obama..

[unitedwethrive]

34. So, if you were not born into a Repub family, you can't be a good president?

There a plenty of intelligent, thoughtful people who didn't have to change political parties to prove (to some) that they are willing to listen to facts and make fair and equitable decisions. Even if that sometimes means changing course.

[NNadir]

36. You may be misinterpreting what I am saying.

Since I have never voted Republican although, in fact, I was born into a Republican family, I have obviously voted for people who were lifelong Democrats. Several of them, not all of them, proved to be outstanding Presidents, the best of my long life time being the last Democratic President, who, by the way, I did not support in the primaries.

I have never heard that President Obama was once a Republican. If I am wrong, I am willing to be corrected.

In fact, I don't recall reference to a single Democratic President for whom I voted who was anything other than a lifelong Democrat, and, the only person for whom I voted in a Presidential election, who was once a Republican, a fact of which I became aware in this thread, was Hillary Clinton.

But let's be clear on something, OK? Hillary Clinton would have been an outstanding President. The damage done to our country by Vladmir Putin, clearly intentional damage, is intense, in some ways possibly worse than Pearl Harbor.

Another thing that about which I wish to be clear is that even though I am a lifelong Democrat, I am very, very, very uncomfortable with my party's generalized approach to the most important issue before humanity, climate change. One may review my scientific posts here in my journal to grasp why and how that is. It's not for discussion here, but I'm quite sure that if I read Ms. Warren's positions as published on that issue, she would most likely be claiming to agree with the majority of my fellow democrats and not with me.

One of the reasons I objected to President Obama, then Senator Obama, in the 2008 Primary season was his enthusiasm for coal-to-oil (Fischer-Tropsch chemistry) programs, originally put forth by Jimmy Carter who is a fine man but, in my view, was a poor President, better than Ford to be sure, better than Nixon and clearly better than Reagan, but a poor President all the same. I note that when Obama was President we heard no more about Fischer-Tropsch chemistry; instead he appointed an outstanding mind, Steven Chu, to be Secretary of Energy, who did and advocated many things with which I whole-heartedly agree.

There is lock-step dogma, and there is flexibility of mind. Right now our country is being run by people who have racist lock step dogma, who do nothing to express even the slightest interest in changing their minds about anything.

This is the essence of conservatism, that nothing should be done for the first time. This is the territory of Nicolas the II, the last czar of Russia and not the territory of an American President, at least a good American President. Regrettably for Russia, Nicolas's replacements were no different in their orthodoxy than Nicolas was in his.

In my opinion the greatest Democrat of the 20th century, into which I was born, was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose surrogate father, after her own father drank himself to death, was a Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt. How she became a Democrat, I have no idea and couldn't care less. Under her guidance, her husband became one of the greatest Presidents our country has ever seen.

You are making a false logical assertion, a statement that a particular case implies the general case. One need not think to deeply to grasp that this is not justifiable, as I am quite sure you are intelligent enough to grasp here, given your displayed support for a clearly intelligent candidate, and recognize what you have said as a hasty generalization on your part.

My appreciation of Elizabeth Warren may involve my own lower middle class roots, having grown up with uneducated Republican parents (although in truth my mother was something of a swing voter), and my understanding, outlined in the OP, that Ms. Warren looked at the evidence, this in an academic setting, to rationally conclude that her original assumption was wrong. This is the scientific method, largely, and God knows, we could use a little respect for science in this culture. Thus, there is both an emotional and an intellectual connection I have with her; and I'd like to believe that the intellectual connection far outweighs the emotional.

It is not true that I would support anyone who switched parties, but I am supporting this person who switched parties, and while the switch itself has been presented as a piece of evidence as to why I should support her, it is not the only reason I do.

Thank you for raising the point and allowing me to clarify my views.

[drmeow]

37. I think it also means she

Will be very good at winning over Republicans