By the late 1970s, he was a conservative. I became a conservative first. Turning into a Republican came second. Brady, by the way, has an explanation for why Republicans don't feel as at home in the House of Representatives as Democrats do. Democrats like process.
Republicans are bored by it.
And it costs Republicans more to be in Congress. Robinson confronts the puzzling question of why Republicans outside Washington appear so successful and happy. For one thing, they don't have the national press corps to deal with. In Washington, the media are unrelentingly hostile to Republicans and delight in portraying GOP leaders as both evil and inept. Robinson thinks the bias is based on the need of reporters to be adversarial, their hatred of Republican publishers, and the fact that Republicans are bad copy.