In her February 2, 2008, Washington Post column entitled Why I'm Backing Obama, Susan Eisenhower -- yes, that Eisenhower, Ike's granddaughter and stalwart continuation of his ideas -- made a bold statement that were he to win the nomination, she would back Barack Obama. Not only did she endorse him, she just left the Republican Party.
From that February column:
I am not alone in worrying that my generation will fail to do what my grandfather's did so well: Leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found.
...
It is in this great tradition of crossover voters that I support Barack Obama's candidacy for president. If the Democratic Party chooses Obama as its candidate, this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected and encourage him to seek strategic solutions to meet America's greatest challenges. To be successful, our president will need bipartisan help.
[emphasis mine]
And yesterday:
I have decided I can no longer be a registered Republican. For the first time in my life I announced my support for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, in February of this year.
...
My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucusus, and this has undermined U.S. national security.
Ms. Eisenhower has re-registered as an independent.
This change should not come as a surprise in the wake of the Georgian action last week. Eisenhower is a consultant, author, and international security expert, specialising in the relationship between the US and Russia. Her husband, Roald Sagdeev, was the director of the Russian Space Research Institute.
Ms Eisenhower has always remained pragmatic and fully tied to her grandfather's beliefs and warnings about the military-industrial complex. She was an old-school Republican: thrifty, cautious, conservative, an empty adjective the GOP continues to label itself with despite their policies and actions being anything but.
Compare and contrast Nixon's Checkers speech with the wealth of the Republicans who have followed him and who now can't even remember how much money and property they have:
...Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat..."
But that's nothing. Compare McCain's admission to being influenced by lobbyists:
I believe that there are times that I have probably been influenced because the big donor, er, buys access to my office, and we know that access is influence.
To Nixon's speech:
And third, let me point out -- and I want to make this particularly clear -- that no contributor to this fund, no contributor to any of my campaigns, has ever received any consideration that he would not have received as an ordinary constituent. I just don't believe in that, and I can say that never, while I have been in the Senate of the United States, as far as the people that contributed to this fund are concerned, have I made a telephone call for them to an agency, or have I gone down to an agency in their behalf. And the records will show that, the records which are in the hands of the administration.
Maybe we don't need the low-info voters as much as we think we do. Maybe we just need some of the higher-profile GOPers to cut their ties to a party which, having been overtaken by fundamentalists and fear-mongers, has lost its way and has as much claim to the word "conservative" as does an experienced prostitute to the word "virginity".