I was a year and three months old when Reagan was inaugurated, so effectively my entire childhood took place during the days of the Reagan and Bush. Clinton was my Adolescence, Bush and now Obama my adulthood.
It's not surprising that I started out believing the Republicans knew best, being a Texan kid, just as the state was completing its turn to red. But I was also a member of a largely liberal family, and somebody who was educated before the media got chopped up into "liberal" and conservative sides. I was a kid back in times when people took reporting more seriously.
There was once space for a moderate in the GOP. I'm still a moderate today, but it's important to understand what being a true moderate means. Moderation isn't the middle for it's own sake, it's a practice of political discipline, one the Republicans forgot.
It's easy to get wrapped up in politics. It can be its own world, with people saying things for reasons that don't add up beyond the confines of the ideological debates.
Moderation for me is remembering that there is a real world, and as mesmerizing as the words and slogans can be, as hypnotic as the causes might be, politics works best and most benignly when it is not ignored, when getting things done, and done right, apart from ideology, is the priority.
I first remember hearing about and from Dr. Warren on the subject of bankruptcies. She went in expecting spendthrift habits on the part of most women in bankruptcy. Instead, she discovered that the actual common denominator tended to be having kids. She discovered through her research that what drove the credit problems of many were the needs that were piling up on these people, all the risk shifts, all the credit card and predatory lending tricks that were impoverishing people with debt.
This is quite the opposite of the "deserving poor" sensibility that the Republicans pushed, the idea that people were mainly going into debt because they simply weren't responsible.
That was her political awakening.
Mine was the fact that for the most part, the folks who were supposed to be conservatives, who were supposed to support law and order, reinforce the institutions already there, and consider change carefully were nothing of the sort.
Very little has changed for the better between me and the Republicans since then. The insistence that the market police itself have worn thin for me, despite my understanding of the complexity of trying to regulate the markets, in no small part because the markets proved themselves not to be up to the task. Their insistence that they knew best on foreign policy was falling on deaf ears by the end of Bush's first term. Their rhetoric on jobs vs. the environment, never all that attractive to me to begin with (in fact one of my early breaking points, since I take scientists more seriously than politicians), has only soured further as the evidence of Global Warming has become more and more compelling.
The simple answer as to why a decade and a half or so of political change has made Dr. Warren and me Democrats is that there is no room in the Republican Party for those who allow experience in the economy and discoveries in the scientific world to influence their thinking on what's the right policy. You are not allowed to let the world change your theories on anything.
What makes many of us Democrats here, especially the former Republicans is one important idea: that policy should be decided based on what's true, and not what we're going to try and force to be true. Politics should be made secondary to what needs to be done, to what works. It's a complex question to answer, but a necessary one, because the further away from the truth we are, the worse the outcomes.
What we need to emphasize to our fellow voters is this dedication to a more practical, more realistic view of policy. We need to highlight the Republican inability and unwillingness to change policies, their resistance to necesssary change. This is not ultimately an election about Democrat vs. Republican, but rather doing things right rather than doing them wrong for the sake of preserving the vested interests of the rich and powerful.