The Morphing of a Democrat
By Michael Boyajian
I had been a Democrat my whole life along with most of my friends and family. In college I worked with NYPIRG on the No Nukes movement. While in college I heard Mario Cuomo speak and he convinced me to support whatever it was that he was advocating due to his great oratory. In 1983 I publically supported John Glenn for president. But the Democrats chose Walter Mondale and that pissed me off and I jumped to the Republican column seduced by the imperial glamour of the Reagan Administration.
Of course there was a lot of foreshadowing to this jump like coming across a William F. Buckley poem in the New York Review of Books that poked fun at Fidel Castro. This led me to occasionally read National Review in the college library for the wit of the erudite Buckley.
So I was enrolled as a Republican on Long Island, not an unusual thing in that area. Then one day while walking through a law school club fair I saw that the GOP table was empty. On an impulse I grabbed the wheel of that club and the rest is history. I rose to GOP prominence with that club while getting involved with the Young Republicans. I got to meet all sorts of big wheel Republicans like Al D’Amato. The one thing I remember was that they were constantly telling me to smile at photo ops something I had difficulty doing for reasons looking back were subliminal.
After law school I was taken under the wing of the Republican leader of Brooklyn Arthur Bramwell whose daughter I knew from law school. He became my mentor and he taught me politics and how to do your best thinking on sleepless nights at 2 in the morning. He was an African American and he helped me to overcome my below the surface racial tendencies developed from growing up on segregated Long Island, a demon that I battle occassionally to this day deep inside the hidden recesses of my mind.
Anyhow, I continued my rise helping to found a local Republican club and running for assembly with the help of my Rockefeller wing Young Republicans. During my time with the YRs I became part of the vast right wing conspiracy as the editor of several GOP newsletters. You see you would go to a Manhattan conservative meeting and someone from the Wall Street Journal would imply something about the Clintons and you would print it as fact, that is how that conspiracy worked.
During this time I helped propel both Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki into office. In the end I ended up as a delegate for George W. Bush from the 10th C.D. in New York at the 2000 Republican convention. I was in effect GOP royalty. I should point out that I was motivated to support Bush because of an article in the New York Times magazine section.
Then Arthur and the YRs landed me a judgeship at the New York State Division of Human Rights and politics went on the backburner that is until Bush invaded Iraq. That invasion went against everything I was raised to believe in and so I renounced the GOP philosophy as a fraud and left the party going on a campaign of letters to the editor in the Times and elsewhere that attacked Bush. My decision was reinforced by the Administration’s attack on gays a group we were once told to reach out to politically. The Pataki administration didn’t seem to mind this letter writing and so I was able to keep my judgeship. I did not officially change my enrollment back to Democrat though until Pataki left office fearing retribution.
And so I went about my business not active but for being happy to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary and then Obama in the general election. Then one day the local Democratic leader called urging me to run for village trustee. I refused at first but finally relented because of the leader’s Obama credentials. They wanted me based on the recommendation of Mara Farrell the leader of a group that I belonged to that worked to save a revolutionary war site in the area I lived in.
I ran a good race but lost because it was a Republican area. Then nothing happened for a while until I had just about given up shopping around a world peace through borderless nations article when Gatemouth of Room Eight gave me the green light to run it on that blog. Soon after that I became a regular blogger there. Then the Fishkill Democratic Committee invited my wife and I to join their organization. I had worked with the leader there, Ozzy Albra, during my trustee run and he liked what he saw. Soon after that we were elevated to the Dutchess County Democratic Committee as well. And now there are rumors flying suggesting that I will be running once again. And that is the saga of my political journey and I am just happy to be out of the desert now enjoying life with friends and family as a born again Democrat.
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