How Many Democrats Have Been Mugged By Reality?

I used to be a Democrat. I voted for George McGovern for President. I stayed a Democrat until about half way through Jimmy Carter‘s presidency. At that point I was mugged by reality. Evidently I was not the only one.

The Daily Caller posted an interview today of Charles Krauthammer (one of my favorite people in the whole world) by Howard Kurtz on the Fox TV show “Media Buzz.” I strongly suggest following the link and reading the entire article, but here are a few highlights:

People don’t remember that in the 1970s, there was a strong conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Pat Moynahan, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, they were called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Committee for the Present Danger… that is where I came out of. Joe Lieberman is the last of those Mohicans, and obviously he had no home in the end.

KURTZ: You were trained, as you mentioned, as a doctor. Does that influence your political prognostications? Analyzing the sanity of those in the political community, perhaps?

KRAUTHAMMER: Oh, no, it never does. However, my training as an M.D. has made me particularly open to empirical evidence. And when you talked about my evolution from a liberal to a conservative, it isn’t that i had an epiphany, the clouds parting and a shaft of light from the sky. I was open to empirical evidence, on the War on Poverty, the Great Society, which I believed in and saw it didn’t work, at least the evidence I read, and I changed. That is the major influence on my life.

I suspect that I am not the only person who can relate to that statement.