# What elected official most turned out to be a "Trojan Horse"?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [October 13, 2008, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713 "2008-10-13T14:23:55Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2008, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/21 "2008-10-14T22:18:36Z")
> [@UnwrittenNocturne](#):
>
> Richard Shelby. Elected to the Senate as a Democrat. When the Republicans gained a majority he switched sides. He would have been a dirtbag either way though
Similarly, Zell Miller was appointed to the Senate (after Paul Coverdell died) as a Democrat, by Democratic governor Roy Barnes. Prior to this, Zell Miller had a strong progressive record as governor of Georgia. (He pioneered the much-imitated Hope Scholarship program, and took on conservatives to try to remove the Confederate flag from the Georgia state flag.)
Yet when he got to the Senate, Miller took a hard right turn to the point of becoming a bile-spewing anti-Democratic partisan and toadie to the Republican Party. He even went so far as to speak at their convention, _a la_ Lieberman. The transformation was astonishing.
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### Author:  [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2008, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/22 "2008-10-14T23:16:08Z")
> [@Don\_t\_Call\_Me\_Shirley](#):
>
> Andrew Johnson fits this description as well. After Lincoln’s assassination, he went so far over to the Democrat side that he thought he would be nominated for president on the Democratic ticket in 1868. In fact he came in second on the first ballot at the Democratic convention, and was bitter about the fact that he felt the Democrats abandoned him.
What a shocker considering that Johnson was a DEMOCRAT.
When he was elected VP in 1864, the combination of Lincoln (R) and him (D) called themselves the Unionist Party.
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### Author:  [@Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypnagogic_Jerk)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2008, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/23 "2008-10-15T17:39:57Z")
> [@Gorsnak](#):
>
> If we’re going to talk about Canadian politics, there’s David “I’m going to be Stephen Harper’s worst nightmare!” Emerson who switched parties immediately after being elected to join Stephen Harper’s cabinet.
We could almost mention Maurice Duplessis. He was the leader of the Conservative party in a Quebec that had been electing Liberal governments for decades. When the Liberals started being plagued by scandals, he made a formal coalition (called the Union nationale, or UN) with a progressive, nationalist party called the Action libérale nationale (ALN). They would join forces in order to defeat the Liberals, and while Duplessis would formally be the leader of the coalition, in case the Union nationale won the election the ALN leaders would in practice control government business and be able to pass their reforms by virtue of being allocated a majority of cabinet ministers.
Now the UN lost the 1935 election, but the Liberal government soon collapsed under the weight of its scandals and a new election was called for 1936. The UN entered this election not as a coalition, but as an actual political party. They won, Duplessis became premier of Quebec, and some of his first moves were to marginalize the ALN leaders in his new government. After just a few weeks most of them had left the UN, either to join the Liberals, or to reform the ALN for the next election. Duplessis’s party basically reverted to the old Conservative party, and he ruled Quebec from 1936 to 1939, and then from 1944 to 1959, with what some would call an iron fist.
It wasn’t until the sixties that some of the ALN’s proposed reforms (the nationalization of electrical companies, for example) were finally put in place.
Of course, we could argue that this is the same case as for Andrew Johnson. Duplessis was a Conservative all along; even as he allied with a party with different objectives, we could expect his nature to come back to the surface soon enough.
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### Author:  [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2011, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/24 "2011-04-11T00:15:30Z")
Peru’s Fujimori. He ran a campaign specifically against economic reform and his runoff rival political plans.
10 days into his government he implemented said economic reforms including raising the price of gasoline by 3000%.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2011, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/25 "2011-04-11T01:20:44Z")
Trojan Zombie! 😃 (It looks horrible, but what’s inside is even **worse**. . .)
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### Author:  [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2011, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/26 "2011-04-11T17:18:33Z")
> [@whorfin](#):
>
> Seconding Lieberman. IIRC, he explicitly promised in a '06 debate against ned lamont (his opponent for the senatorial seat) that he’d support the democratic candidate for president.
I don’t think that counts. At the time he was running for the Democratic nomination, and his promise was made in that context. He subsequently lost that race and won the seat as an independent. IMHO he’s no longer bound by that type of promise.
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### Author:  [@The\_Raven\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Raven_1)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2011, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/27 "2011-04-11T19:34:42Z")
[Remember The Clinton “middle-class tax cut”?](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/15/news/15iht-cut1.html)
Maybe not a full-on Trojan Horse, but definitely a pile of horseshit in the general shape of its creator.
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### Author:  [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2011, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/28 "2011-04-11T23:28:31Z")
I don’t think Bush would count, because I don’t know if during the political campaign of 2000 he was really in the back of his mind considering policies that had nothing to do with what he actually did as president.
I’d say recently the 2006, 2008 and 2010 elections, in the general sense, all fit the bill.
In 2006 dems ran on ending the war in Iraq and never did
In 2008 Obama ran on fighting plutocracy, secrecy and backroom deals then implemented policies supporting these things
In 2010 the GOP ran on jobs and once elected was more concerned with union busting, abortion and supply side tax cuts
I can’t think of any particular candidate though. But the platforms in the 2008 (fighting plutocracy and secrecy) and 2010 elections (creating jobs) in the general sense come across as crass manipulation since behavior in office was the near opposite.
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### Author:  [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2011, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/29 "2011-04-12T01:06:42Z")
> [@astro](#):
>
> GW Bush -
>
> Sold as having a responsible, conservative temperment. What we got was 180 degrees off.
You know, I really think his personal convictions _are_ of a conservative temperament. I really think he was in way over his head and bowed to his daddy’s buddies far too many times. I got a sense he matured by the last year of his presidency and only wish it’d been THAT Bush that lead us through the preceding 7 years.
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### Author:  [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2011, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/30 "2011-04-12T08:03:02Z")
Obama promised us New York Asian escorts, and look where that got us!
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2011, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/31 "2011-04-12T10:11:45Z")
> [@Koxinga](#):
>
> Obama promised us New York Asian escorts, and look where that got us!
Removed spam for, well, you can guess.
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### Author:  [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2011, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/32 "2011-04-12T10:31:48Z")
Vaguely remembered from the 90s, some guy ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for a seat in some midwestern state legislature in the primary. He was quickly revealed to be from the Lyndon Larouche organization, and the state Democratic party red-facedly endorsed the Republican nominee.
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2011, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/33 "2011-04-12T23:42:12Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#):
>
> I don’t think Bush would count, because I don’t know if during the political campaign of 2000 he was really in the back of his mind considering policies that had nothing to do with what he actually did as president.
He WOULD count. Invading Iraq on any excuse he can drum up was not part of his campaign platform, but wouldn’t ya know it, it was a BIG part of the Project for a New American Century’s plans for the Middle East. A lot of his administration’s top guys were members of the PNAC … Cheney, for example. So … definite Trojan Horse.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2011, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-elected-official-most-turned-out-to-be-a-trojan-horse/467713/34 "2011-04-13T01:37:27Z")
A “Trojan Horse” is a porn star with a rubber on! Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk! 😃
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