Recent Updates by Topic

Op-Ed

The Prodigal Texan: One Red-Stater's journey from Republican to Democrat and back again

Print: Email: Share:

If You Can Keep It

Three years ago — about a month before Election Day 2005 — I received an e-mail that I’ve kept stored away ever since.

It was a response to a letter to the editor I had written that same month upbraiding the administration for its laughable reaction — rather, lack thereof — to the Redbud Woods protesters who had stormed Day Hall and occupied then-President Lehman’s office the semester prior, only to then argue that the idea of being held accountable for their actions was so overrated.

“It’s often an Alice in Wonderland world here in Ithaca,” the e-mail read. “It’s obvious that I need to move to Texas, but I will put that off, I hope, for at least 4 more years.”

I have mentioned this e-mail on these pages before; it was from George Dentes, the veteran Tompkins County District Attorney who was running for re-election at the time and, needless to say, believed that a certain idea had become greatly underrated, both on this campus and in this community.

“We had,” he told me, “a saying in Brooklyn, where I lived for a few years while working in New York City: ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ ”

I agreed with him.

Cornell — and, ultimately, the voters of Tompkins County — did not; that November, George lost the election and, with it, the job that he would have held for a total of two decades.

Less than a year later, the man who had inspired this staunch Southern Democrat to cast his first-ever vote for a Republican would fall victim to a heart attack and depart this world for one that, as I sought to convey in my tribute to him published a few days afterward, got a little bit pearlier when he showed up.

But George’s legacy, I am here to say, did not end there, and that tribute did not turn out to be the end of the story for me, either.

Last month, I made what was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made — and the story of how I came to make it only begins with what I have already told you.

Never, Dear Reader, say never.

I did once; never, I resolved, sometime after the anything-but-conservative decision by the Texas GOP to so gruesomely gerrymander the Lone Star State — never, I resolved, sometime after the anything-but-conservative decision by my former governor to engage in nation-building abroad — never, I resolved, sometime after the anything-but-conservative decision by congressional Republicans at all levels to compromise their principles for politics, their prudence for power — never, never, never would I again partake in what I felt was anything but a Grand Old Party.

But never, it turns out, is not all that long a time, for — just a few weeks ago — I did precisely what I said I would never do: I reattached myself to my Republican roots.

My decision to once again jump ship — to transition from one party to another, from Democrat to Republican, particularly after already having done the same thing the other way around — was not an easy one, nor was it one that I made on a whim last month.

It was, rather, a decision that I made over a series of months, starting, of course, when I had my first encounter with George Dentes in October 2005 and began to reassess just where and who I was.

I had arrived at Cornell the quintessential scorned man, a devout Republican turned devout Democrat, driven out of the GOP by a party leadership hopelessly hostage to an inflexible ideology. The conservatism I knew — the philosophy of Russell Kirk, the man Reagan called the “prophet of American conservatism” — was the negation of ideology; politics, to me as it had been to Kirk, was the art of the possible, the art of compromise, statesmanship, and diplomacy.

Within the Republican Party, newly-empowered neoconservatives and others who believed themselves possessed of the Right Answer to Everything shouted down dissenting brethren with a socialist’s fervor, packaging right-wing ideas within a left-wing framework in the service of a totally oxymoronic conservative ideology.

I, suffice it to say, was one of the dissenting brethren, who, with a broken heart, turned to what had historically been the governing party of the South — as well as the governing coalition of America, comprised of people of all political persuasions — to rectify this situation. I got involved with the Cornell Democrats, helped them and the national Democratic Party in the push to defeat Bush, and all-the-while tried to bring my brand of Southern conservatism back to the party that had once proven so amenable to it in the golden days of FDR and Harry Truman.

Alas, it is that party no more.

It is, instead, the party that missed the point; rather than steer itself right where the GOP had steered itself wrong, it steered itself left where the GOP had steered itself right. The Democrats didn’t win in 2006 because Americans rejected Republican politics — they won in 2006 because Americans rejected what had become the Republican approach to politics.

The Grand Old Party, for the most part, has realized this, and — as a consequence — has never been grander; Republicans from presidential hopeful and maverick conservative Senator John McCain to former Speaker of the House and traditional conservative Newt Gingrich have emphasized the need to restore the party from the inside out.

For the sake of their party and their country, Democrats — lest they continue to make the same mistake my GOP once did — should listen.

Take it from this Republican — you’ll regret it if you don’t.

Mark Coombs is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mcoombs@cornellsun.com. If You Can Keep It appears alternate Fridays.

• Add new comment
• Printer-friendly version
• send to friend