Reply #56: I actually have grown more liberal the longer I stay with DU...

[WCGreen]

I too came here sometime around 2002. I was a big fan of Bartcop and found this site through links on Bart.

I had just walked away from an eight year immersion in big city politics where the name of the game was preserving the jobs and the spoils of office to the people who support your candidacy.

I was shocked at how disengaged the "professional" political people were from policy. I saw a lot of people who ran as Democrats only because they couldn't run as Republicans.

It was a brutal awakening.

Now when I worked at the Statehouse in the late 70's, that was all about politics as well. But the policy came into the mix and was a result of the give and take of politics. The democratic leadership was able to get some pretty liberal stuff through because of compromise.