April 1, 2004
BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE (via Ed Driscoll):
My unlikely bridge to the right (Paul Beston, March 27, 2004, Washington Times)
A few years ago, I worked for a struggling dot-com in Manhattan whose work force was almost uniformly liberal. Given my conservative orientation, I saw little sense in getting involved in workplace political discussions. My silence was interpreted as acquiescence until I could stand it no longer and fessed up. One co-worker, who had served on the committee that hired me, felt betrayed."But," he stammered, remembering my resume, "You worked for NPR."
Actually, I never worked directly for NPR, but rather for a production company whose program was carried on 100 NPR stations. It was a distinction without a difference -- I had worked in public radio.
My colleague's incredulity implied disappointment with public broadcasting's ideological screening process: How had I gotten through? He would have been even more surprised if he had known the truth: I had arrived in public radio not as a conservative, but as a liberal, if an admittedly disaffected one. By the time I was through with public radio, I was through with liberalism, too.
I was a co-producer for one of the most unusual programs NPR ever carried, "Bridges: A Liberal/Conservative Dialogue." The premise was a discussion between the liberal of the show's title, Larry Josephson, and leading conservative thinkers. [...]
By the time I arrived in 1997 as a co-producer in charge of writing, research and booking guests, the program was in its third year. I had been a liberal since college, but the performance of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had shaken my old certainties. Crime was dropping precipitously all around the city. The drug dealers were gone from the street corners of my East Village neighborhood, and Grand Calcutta was becoming Grand Central again. Watching the city change before me, I was worried: Was I starting to like Giuliani? Would it pass?
One is struck by how often recent converts to conservatism and those who've simply come out of the closet--like Dennis Miller--mention that Rudy Giuliani, and the success of his conservative crime-fighting programs, played the key role in their journey. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2004 8:08 AM
If you lived, or even visited New York in the third term of the Koch administration or during the Dinkins period, it was impossible not to admit the changes that occurred under Giuliani (ironically, given the passage of time and the traditional liberalism of New Yorkers, you would figure by now they would have forgotten about the mess under Dinkins and gone back to their traditional liberal candidate patterns and beliefs about crime, the way they forgot about the disaster of the John Lindsey-Abe Beame years by the end of the 1980s. That probably will happen eventually, but Sept. 11 pushed that date back by at least four years and possibly more).
Posted by: John at April 1, 2004 9:38 AM