Web Op-Ed: I Used to be a Democrat by David Epstein
By David Epstein
My trajectory from Democrat to Republican had a few curves of my own making. First, I volunteered to work for George McGovern as the 1972 campaign's Ohio general counsel. I stood behind George McGovern, a brave World War II pilot and mushy foreign policy thinker, simply because he was the lesser evil alongside Richard Nixon.
In 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter. As President, Carter said we had made bad decisions based on "an inordinate fear of communism." I traveled in the Soviet Union and its satellites and spoke with the victims of the totalitarian states; my observation was that an inordinate fear of communism is totally warranted.
Later, Carter had a rude awakening when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, saying, "My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week...