ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Apr. 26 2007

Personal conversions are possible for pundits as well as politicians
by Colleen Carroll Campbell

Tracking the flip-flops of presidential hopefuls has become a national pastime
in our Internet age, and candidates have responded by perfecting the art of the
political conversion story. Most voters distrust these tales of liberal
enlightenment or road-to-Damascus right turns. But I have a soft spot for them,
because I have one of my own.

Mine begins with my father, a die-hard Democrat whose partisan loyalties once
ran nearly as deep as his Catholic faith. Growing up in north St. Louis, Dad
learned that liberals care about the little guy: working-class immigrants like
my Irish-born grandfather, the hobos my grandmother fed from her porch during
the Depression and the mentally handicapped whose concerns would become the
focus of my father's career in the charitable sector.

That career led my father to move my mother, brother and me to more than half a
dozen states during my childhood. I experienced America's red-and-blue-state
divide firsthand, and everywhere we lived, Dad and I delighted in critiquing
local op-ed pages, waging dinner-table debates and holding election night TV
vigils. Dad taught me that political contests have a moral character because
they have moral consequences and that we can judge our democracy by how well it
defends the vulnerable and voiceless.

Those lessons were reinforced during my years at Marquette University, where I
spent more than a few week- nights clearing tables at soup kitchens and
interviewing homeless men for the alternative campus newspaper. An interest in
social reform led me to journalism and the Post-Dispatch, where I reported on
the city schools before joining the editorial page to tackle social justice
issues.

I spent my days interviewing family court judges and mothers struggling to
leave welfare, ex-prisoners and advocates for abused children, high school
dropouts and teachers educating against the odds. Many of my sources were
children in gang-infested neighborhoods who showed me their scars and their
knives. They told me how they longed to know their fathers or spend more time
with their mothers and confessed their terror at living in a world without
boundaries or safe places.

I wrote editorials demanding more government spending and programs to address
the problems I saw. But I was beginning to have my doubts.

If more bureaucracy were the answer, why had a welfare system designed to
provide temporary assistance trapped generations in dependency? I had seen the
statistics showing the correlation between social ills and the breakdown of
marriage and family. If marriage had no public purpose and the abolition of
sexual mores led only to women's liberation, why were we constantly enacting
new laws to make men honor obligations — from child support to sexual propriety
— once enforced largely by social pressure? Had our quest for absolute freedom
from communal standards and conventional morality made us less free by
subjecting us to the dictates of the nanny state and political correctness
police?

I began to follow debates I once had ignored about the value of human life, the
tenor of popular culture, the meaning of marriage and the public role of
religion. I became convinced that tradition is an indispensable guide in our
pursuit of liberty and happiness and that lasting social change demands
solutions that are spiritual and moral, as well as material.

I still believe that politics is a moral enterprise and that defense of the
weak is its loftiest aim. But my ideas about how to achieve that aim have
changed. I no longer consider compassion and conservatism antonyms or calls to
personal responsibility and solidarity with the poor incompatible. And I
believe more than ever in the power of personal transformation to redeem
families, communities, nations — even politicians.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.