It’s more than doors between government and the businesses that they supposedly regulate that go round and round. One of the other swinging doors is between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
A second door
Perhaps the best known case is when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Then, in 2008, Lieberman showed up at the Republican national convention to endorse John McCain for president. Between those two campaigns, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was rumored to be leaning to ask Republican John McCain to be his running mate.
Had Al Gore won, Lieberman would most likely have been the subsequent Democratic nominee for president. Had John Kerry won with McCain on the ticket, McCain would have been the heir apparent to the “Democratic Party” crown. Whether Lieberman or McCain, Democrats across the country would have been told to bow in reverence to their party’s red-blue nominee for president.
This was hardly the first time such a switcheroo blossomed in American politics. In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln dumped his sitting vice-president to ask Democrat Andrew Johnson to be his running mate. After Lincoln’s murder, US voters, who had selected a Republican to be their president, found him replaced by a Democrat.
Though such examples at the presidential level may be enshrined in history books, they happen all the time at the local level. In 1963, the Texas Young Democrats…