Nostalgia For the Democratic Party

William "Bill" Proxmire -D

...the old Democratic Party!
They say confession is good for the soul, so if I haven't told you before, I have a secret shame. A dark, dirty shameful secret, but I feel like you're family here so, here goes:

I used to be a Democrat!

Not just any Democrat, a McGovern Democrat! I proved Sir Winston's aphorism that if a man isn't a liberal when he is eighteen, he has no heart. If he's not a conservative by the time he's thirty, he has no brain!

We recently saw an example of government waste, a Department of Education attaché based in Paris that costs $632,000 per year. (Fiscal Responsibility in the Age of Obama) and it got me to thinking about some of the Democrats I grew up with. One fixture in the Washington of my youth, was William Proxmire (D-WI).

Bill Proxmire used to give out his Golden Fleece Award to outrageous government spending. (I think the French education attaché would qualify!)

According to wiki,

The first was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love. Other Golden Fleece awards over the years were "awarded" to the Justice Department for conducting a study on why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, the National Institute of Mental Health to study a Peruvian brothel ("The researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy," reported the New York Times), and the Federal Aviation Administration, for studying "the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the 'length of the buttocks.'"

Ever wonder whatever happened to the Democrats? Why are there no John Kennedys cutting taxes, or Bill Proxmires exposing government waste today? Ronald Reagan (a slightly more famous ex-Democrat) said that his party left him. Why do I have the feeling that those really solid Democrats that the party didn't leave were chased away?

Cross Posted at Say Anything