I like that designation too....OR = Obama Republicans....sorta like the Mugwumps of old.... But instead of the Tea Party folks becoming the Mugwumps, in yesteryear it was the folks like the OR's that bolted....NOT the TP folks....The TP folks became the party that most of us thought we knew in earlier years....Perhaps it is the OR's who will be doing the bolting......
KLP offers a PS....In school, there were various pictures of Mugwumps....their Mug was on one side of the fence and their Rump was on the other side.....
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Mugwump
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This article is about dissident 1884 US Republicans. For other uses, see Mugwump (disambiguation).
1884 cartoon by Bernhard Gillam in Puck magazine ridicules Blaine as the tattooed-man, with many indelible scandals. The cartoon image is a parody of Phryne before the Areopagus, an 1861 painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
The Mugwumps were Republican political activists who bolted from the United States Republican Party by supporting Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland in the United States presidential election of 1884. They switched parties because they rejected the financial corruption associated with Republican candidate James G. Blaine. In a close election, the Mugwumps supposedly made the difference in New York state and swung the election to Cleveland. The jocular word mugwump, noted as early as 1832, is from Algonquian (Natick) mugquomp, "important person, kingpin" (from mugumquomp, "war leader") [1] implying that they were "sanctimonious" or "holier-than-thou," [2] in holding themselves aloof from party politics.
After the election, mugwump survived for more than a decade as an epithet for a party bolter in American politics. Many Mugwumps became Democrats or remained independents; most continued to support reform well into the 20th century. [3] During the Third Party System, party loyalty was in high regard and independents were rare. Theodore Roosevelt stunned his upper class New York City friends by supporting Blaine in 1884; by rejecting the Mugwumps he kept alive his Republican party leadership, clearing the way for his own political aspirations. [4]
New England and the Northeastern United States had been a stronghold of the Republican Party since the Civil War era, but the Mugwumps considered Blaine to be an untrustworthy and fraudulent candidate. Their idealism and reform sensibilities led them to oppose the political corruption in the politics of the Gilded Age. [5]
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