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.
