Political switch hitters

OF ALL THE losers in Tuesday’s elections, surely the most pathetic is Randy Kelly, the deposed mayor of St. Paul, Minn. Kelly, a Democrat, was considered to be successful and popular until fate took a turn in the summer of 2004. That’s when he endorsed George W. Bush for reelection and barnstormed the state with the president’s campaign.

Voters in the overwhelmingly Democratic city reacted with understandable horror, and immediately candidates sprung up to challenge him. As his polls plummeted, Kelly was reduced to pleading: “Voting against me won’t bring the troops home. It won’t stick it to George Bush.” Voting against Kelly certainly did not bring home the troops, and it may or may not have stuck it to Bush, but it almost certainly felt very, very good. Kelly lost on Tuesday by an astonishing 40-point margin.

The art of switching your political allegiance is a tricky one. If executed well, it can bring fame, prestige and riches. If mishandled, you can wind up like Randy Kelly -- jobless and the most hated man in town.

There seem to be two key elements to a successful switch. The first is timing. You want to hop from the losing team to the winning team, obviously. Kelly endorsed Bush at a time when pundits were suggesting the Democratic Party was doomed to extinction everywhere but in a few coastal enclaves. Since then, Bush’s popularity has withered.

The second is opportunity. You can’t abandon your old supporters until you can be reasonably sure that there are new ones -- preferably more numerous, richer and/or more powerful than the old ones -- ready to embrace you. This was Kelly’s most obvious blunder. Once you’ve alienated the voters in your town, you can’t very well pack up and go become mayor of some other town.

Most successful switches have gone from left to right. Prominent Southern Democrats such as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms saw that their party’s support for civil rights would doom it to minority status in the region. They ended their careers as prominent Southern Republicans, mostly forgiven for the segregationism that propelled their switches in the first place.

It can work just as well for writers. The classic case here is the neoconservatives. Most of the original neocons started out as left-wing New York Jewish intellectuals. That was a fine thing to be, except that you can barely walk a block in New York without tripping over some left-wing Jewish intellectual. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was starving for New York Jewish intellectuals. Peanut butter, meet chocolate.

The neoconservatives, mostly former Trotskyites, had the good fortune of changing their minds about almost everything starting in the mid-1960s, just as the political fortunes of the left began to collapse. Today they are far richer and more influential as right-wing New York Jewish intellectuals than they had ever been in their previous incarnation. Their pithy lines are widely quoted, and they’re the subjects of books and even films. Not many current Trotskyites can say the same.

The most exquisite sense of timing surely belongs to Arianna Huffington. Huffington exploded onto the scene as a Newt Gingrich ally in the mid-1990s, playing host to glamorous salons and running the Center for Effective Compassion. She defected from the right about the time Gingrich’s revolution began imploding, and she reemerged as a left-wing gadfly at the end of the decade. In 2000, at a time when liberals were disgusted with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, Huffington was running “shadow conventions” where she could rail against the emptiness and pointlessness of partisan politics.

A couple years later, liberals figured out that partisan ennui may not make for such an effective tactic in the face of Bush’s ruthless partisanship, and they began focusing on winning the election. Huffington was there to fight the good partisan fight on behalf of John Kerry. Today her coterie is wealthier, more famous and more beautiful than ever.

Anticipating these shifts in the zeitgeist is not so easy. After 9/11, writer Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing demagogue turned right-wing demagogue, transferred his allegiance to the GOP. In those heady days of moral clarity, Hitchens’ old allies were on the defensive, and Bush allies were riding high. He seemed to be having a grand time excoriating Islamo-fascists and waxing eloquent about the plight of the Kurds.

Yet, in retrospect, Hitchens made the mistake of buying into the GOP not when it was at low tide, as the neoconservatives had done, but at the peak of its popularity. Things have not gone so well recently, and now he’s stuck with less romantic assignments: defending the innocence of Karl Rove, insisting the invasion of Iraq was not really bungled beyond repair and gamely pointing out that we’re torturing far fewer people than Saddam Hussein ever did. Hitchens seems to be having less fun these days. On the plus side, at least he still has a job.