Five months after the election, the acrimony seems to have died down – at least on the surface. I still see the occasional poster in various apartments from Broadway to Columbus. There are the random Kerry-Edwards buttons (worn for protest or pride), but for the most part, it’s quiet. Some of it can even be humorous. I was on the subway last week when my child, who is becoming a great reader, noticed a young woman next to us wearing a button that said: “I Only Sleep With Democrats.” Of course, I was immediately asked what that meant. I explained the woman had a sleep disorder, wondering how long I can fob off this bright child with obfuscation. In our building, there’s a 4-year-old who has two large stickers on his backpack with a slash through a “W” … in the same place where other 4-year-olds have Yankees or Mets stickers. In my neighborhood, politics is a professional sport.

Of course, the constant Bush bashing that I hear in casual conversation continues, but even there it’s less strident. The Iraqi election seems to have taken the wind out of the their sails – God forbid they would ever admit they were wrong and the president may have been right on that one. I still see the rolling of the eyes, the complete dismissal of his “lack of intellect,” and the obvious digs that aren’t terribly original or funny. When reporters pressed the president on his reading list and he obliged, the reaction was so predictable: Everyone around me said they were shocked, shocked that he could read. In many ways, it outdoes the Clinton bashing during the ’90s, which I found counterproductive as well. The way I see it, George W. Bush won reelection by more than 3 million votes. For those who can’t accept this, my advice is, relax, you’ll have another shot at the White House in just 1,286 days. One more bit of advice: Maybe the folks in my neighborhood should at least try to understand where the rest of the country stands and why these people feel the way they do because the map I saw the day after the election showed a lot more red states than blue.

And I’ll take my own advice. For my part, I wonder why it is that I may be in step with much of the country and yet so clearly out of step with everyone around me. Of course, being a West Sider, there is the tendency to overanalyze myself, wondering how I came to this point. I’ve read terms like 9-11 Republicans, neo-cons, and even neo-neo cons. I’m not crazy about labels. To tell you the truth … I came late to the party …

The Early X Years

Like most of my neighbors on the Upper West Side, I grew up in a family of staunch Democrats. My grandparents and parents talked about Eleanor and Franklin in almost hushed tones, as if they were talking about God. In the state where I grew up (far from New York), which went Republican in my childhood, one’s political affiliation was usually based on religion: Lutherans voted Republican, Jews voted for Democrats, and the Catholics went both ways, except in 1960. (I still remember in the fourth grade hearing the Lutherans explain with absolute certainty how a secret phone line would be installed between the Vatican and the White House if Kennedy won.)

As I passed through the ’60s and ’70s, I began to notice a disturbing trend: The Democrats I liked best – the realists – people like George Marshall, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Scoop Jackson … were replaced by people like Gary Hart, Jimmy Carter, and another very different Jackson named Jesse. Republicans, I was told, were against civil rights. Who could be against civil rights except racists, and who wanted to support or even be associated with racists? That was driven home when the Southern Democrats who fought the early civil rights bills moved to the Republican side of the aisle en masse. Somehow, the racists and anti-Semites in the Democratic Party, both white and black, were overlooked.

So I didn’t have the foresight to figure it out in eighth grade when paleoconservatives backed Barry Goldwater. I supported LBJ who, we were told, would keep us out of war. It didn’t happen years later when the neo-conservatives switched to Ronald Reagan, the man who brought us back to a stronger sense of ourselves (after the disastrous term of Mr. Carter) and, at the same time, helped defeat an utterly despicable empire many of us assumed was unbeatable. But throughout this time, like some deep-seated neurosis, I had a nagging sense that something was off – I just couldn’t articulate it. There were signs (aren’t there always?) … the most obvious: I kept voting for Democratic candidates (McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis), but I was secretly relieved when they lost. The reason? I didn’t think they’d make good presidents. So why, you may ask, did I vote for them in the first place? Why did I hold on to this voting pattern as if it were an addiction? The simple answer: The power of family and upbringing is that strong. I was voting by habit.

What finally changed me was not an epiphany or even a light bulb, but a series of events. I saw even more odious people in the Democratic Party replace the earlier ones I didn’t care for in the first place … people such as Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney, and, now, Howard Dean. I feel as if my friends who are active Democrats are stuck in some sort of romantic vision of themselves from the ’60s. From our conversations, I honestly don’t believe they have really advanced much since then. (Recently, another parent in my child’s class was passing out flyers for one of those large protests coming up against the war in Iraq. Here is an intelligent woman – someone I actually like – who will be marching with a conglomeration of Stalinists, Lyndon LaRouchites, and the rest of the anti-globalization contingent – and I will bet there will be more than one sign equating “Nazism with Zionism,” but somehow no signs condemning Palestinian suicide bombings of Jewish mothers, babies, and old people. I don’t care how much you might care for a cause, how do you join ranks with anti-Semites?)

My political conversion was also furthered when I began to realize that the intellectual high ground had been captured by conservatives who argue with logic, fact, and far superior writing. It is the conservative think tanks that really think. I find the pages of The New York Sun, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal more electric and fun to read than the New York Review of Books (zzzz), the Nation (ZZZZ), and the New Yorker (which I am constantly told was once a great magazine). During this time, I also began to notice little hypocrisies among my liberal friends. One, who spent her time and a great deal of her inherited money fighting to “save public schools,” managed to send all of her own children to top-notch private institutions – the ones with beautiful New England campuses and great scarves. When I once raised this dichotomy with her, she turned on me with surprising savagery. I hear these same people complain bitterly about Fox News and the “right-wing bias” of the mainstream press – a concept I find ludicrous when faced with the editorial page of the New York Times … or the recent problems at CBS. These friends would never acknowledge the left leanings of National Public Radio.

The Conversion

My fundamental beliefs began to fall completely apart in the 1980s. I listened as my friends called Ronald Reagan an idiot, yet I saw him handling his presidency with great skill. At some point, you have to realize that can’t all just be acting. At some point, if you are really honest with yourself, you have to credit the man. I guess I finally reached that point where common sense overcame habit … when what I actually saw trumped what everyone around me said I saw. Today, I listen to friends voice the same criticism of Mr. Bush, yet to my mind he appears to be running a White House at a very difficult time with focus, skill, and common sense. Although we’ll never know – I haven’t been convinced by his actions since 2000 – that Al Gore could have done the same.

So I switched parties and voted for a Republican, thus catching a mother lode of grief from family, friends, and neighbors. But I survived the actual event: My right hand did not lose its cunning when I emerged from the voting booth. The bad reaction came not from me but from those around me. I’ve talked before about how our social life has been impaired since I voiced these views aloud – how we haven’t seen certain friends now for years. But I am reinforced by other souls who appear in my neighborhood like angels. There’s my next-door neighbor, a native New Yorker, who feels more strongly than I do … and as isolated. There’s a former co-worker who turns up at an event in Connecticut to disclose that she and her entire family think along the same lines. There’s the husband of a friend in our social circle who will quietly seek a few minutes with me at a party so we can reorient ourselves – kind of like one of those chiropractic adjustments. There’s a whole group of people at the house of worship I’ve switched to who have all moved there because politics is specifically kept from the pulpit. What a concept … a religious service that deals only with God. And, of course, there were all those funny and articulate people who filled the entire op-ed page of this paper a week after the first Mr. X column [“The Mister X Files – You’re Not Alone,” September 15, 2004] who voiced strong agreement with wit and reason.

I still get those glances when people discover my political views don’t fit my social background, my religion, or my neighborhood. But, as I’ve said before, I can deal with all that … because I’m smart enough, I’m good enough, and, doggonit, my guy won.