In 2000, I was just into a new job, and really didn't care at all about politics.
In 2000, I believed Al Gore was a lying putz.
In 2000, my wife quite literally took me by my ear to the polling place, where, out of frustration, I voted for Nader.
In 2000, I thought there was no difference between Gore and Bush.
What happened?
My hypothesis is this: I represent a group of voters who either did not exist in 2000 or didn't care, and are voting Kerry.
I was a sheep on 9/11, and loved Bushs' little talk at ground zero. So why did I end up here? It all started innocently enough. I work in IT, and several friends that work in cryptography warned me about new legislation called the PATRIOT act that would severelly curtail civil rights. Then several arab co-workers were 'questioned' for a couple weeks. Since we were are on a large ERP implementation, it pissed me off they were gone (I had a higher work load), so I started asking questions. I found out they were not coming back, and to this day I still don't know what happened to one of them. The lack of answers as to what was going on with them set an alarm off in my head. I bumped into salon.com and was intrigued. I started to feel the government everywhere - I work on OSS in my spare time and all of the sudden, there was alot of talk in those circles of government activity. It was at work. It was at play. I was starting to get sick of all the fear. Then I hit this little ditty on Slashdot:
What's Your Terrorism Quotient? And I started to really wonder what really was going on. Next came visits to TPM, then Atrios, and finally here.
I realize now that politics do matter. That we are voting on nothing less then the future of Democracy in America. That John Kerry is not the anti-Bush, but John Kerry. That Bush is killing men for many reasons, none of them good. That lack of a conscience is not a good thing to have in a President. That Bush is trying to destroy science, the arts, and environment.
Why is my conversion important? Because I was the definition of the disinterested voter. Now I'm not. Because my friends then thought as I did, and they all had the same conversion. Because I am in Bush's wheel house - white, male, middle-aged, well off, and in East Texas. And I can't stand him. And I'm not alone, nor in the minority among those I know. And I scan my calls, so I've never been polled.
I think there are millions of us out there, and we are VERY motivated. I got dragged to the polls last time. I'm voting early this year.