I support Elizabeth Warren because, according to the NYT puff piece, she used to be a Republican.

[NNadir]

36. You may be misinterpreting what I am saying.

Since I have never voted Republican although, in fact, I was born into a Republican family, I have obviously voted for people who were lifelong Democrats. Several of them, not all of them, proved to be outstanding Presidents, the best of my long life time being the last Democratic President, who, by the way, I did not support in the primaries.

I have never heard that President Obama was once a Republican. If I am wrong, I am willing to be corrected.

In fact, I don't recall reference to a single Democratic President for whom I voted who was anything other than a lifelong Democrat, and, the only person for whom I voted in a Presidential election, who was once a Republican, a fact of which I became aware in this thread, was Hillary Clinton.

But let's be clear on something, OK? Hillary Clinton would have been an outstanding President. The damage done to our country by Vladmir Putin, clearly intentional damage, is intense, in some ways possibly worse than Pearl Harbor.

Another thing that about which I wish to be clear is that even though I am a lifelong Democrat, I am very, very, very uncomfortable with my party's generalized approach to the most important issue before humanity, climate change. One may review my scientific posts here in my journal to grasp why and how that is. It's not for discussion here, but I'm quite sure that if I read Ms. Warren's positions as published on that issue, she would most likely be claiming to agree with the majority of my fellow democrats and not with me.

One of the reasons I objected to President Obama, then Senator Obama, in the 2008 Primary season was his enthusiasm for coal-to-oil (Fischer-Tropsch chemistry) programs, originally put forth by Jimmy Carter who is a fine man but, in my view, was a poor President, better than Ford to be sure, better than Nixon and clearly better than Reagan, but a poor President all the same. I note that when Obama was President we heard no more about Fischer-Tropsch chemistry; instead he appointed an outstanding mind, Steven Chu, to be Secretary of Energy, who did and advocated many things with which I whole-heartedly agree.

There is lock-step dogma, and there is flexibility of mind. Right now our country is being run by people who have racist lock step dogma, who do nothing to express even the slightest interest in changing their minds about anything.

This is the essence of conservatism, that nothing should be done for the first time. This is the territory of Nicolas the II, the last czar of Russia and not the territory of an American President, at least a good American President. Regrettably for Russia, Nicolas's replacements were no different in their orthodoxy than Nicolas was in his.

In my opinion the greatest Democrat of the 20th century, into which I was born, was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose surrogate father, after her own father drank himself to death, was a Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt. How she became a Democrat, I have no idea and couldn't care less. Under her guidance, her husband became one of the greatest Presidents our country has ever seen.

You are making a false logical assertion, a statement that a particular case implies the general case. One need not think to deeply to grasp that this is not justifiable, as I am quite sure you are intelligent enough to grasp here, given your displayed support for a clearly intelligent candidate, and recognize what you have said as a hasty generalization on your part.

My appreciation of Elizabeth Warren may involve my own lower middle class roots, having grown up with uneducated Republican parents (although in truth my mother was something of a swing voter), and my understanding, outlined in the OP, that Ms. Warren looked at the evidence, this in an academic setting, to rationally conclude that her original assumption was wrong. This is the scientific method, largely, and God knows, we could use a little respect for science in this culture. Thus, there is both an emotional and an intellectual connection I have with her; and I'd like to believe that the intellectual connection far outweighs the emotional.

It is not true that I would support anyone who switched parties, but I am supporting this person who switched parties, and while the switch itself has been presented as a piece of evidence as to why I should support her, it is not the only reason I do.

Thank you for raising the point and allowing me to clarify my views.