An insight into why joining the D party actually takes some thinking.
I am part of the reason why Democrats have not been successful in the Trump era. I am someone who should be a Democrat, but I’m not. Let me explain.
I was a Republican most of my life — I even worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan. I was very comfortable with the Reagan-era GOP. It was conservative, but not obsessively so, and not at the expense of proper governance. Republicans today easily forget all the “liberal” things Reagan did, such as raising taxes 11 times, giving amnesty to illegal aliens, pulling US troops out of Lebanon, negotiating nuclear disarmament and many other heresies to conservative dogma.
At first, I cheered the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and even contemplated going back to work on Capitol Hill. I remember being invited to many meetings with Newt Gingrich and other Republican leaders to help them shape their agenda.
The simplest way to explain my intellectual and political evolution is that I had previously seen the Republican glass as half-full, now I saw it as half-empty.
But soon, I was disturbed by things I saw the new majority doing in Congress. One of the first was slashing some 3,000 staff slots from the congressional committees. I thought this was very unwise because committee staff were the primary source of policy expertise. “Without staff to do the work, how were Republicans going to implement their agenda competently?” I thought.
Read more: http://billmoyers.com/story/im-not-democrat/
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