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Department of ApostateWhat happened to all those Democrats for McCain?

By Christopher BeamPosted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009, at 6:07 PM ET

Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCainWhen Joe Lieberman returned to the Senate after Election Day, the question among many Democrats was not whether he would be punished but how. Some colleagues thought he should be stripped of his committee chairmanships. Others advocated booting him from the caucus entirely. Bloggers on the left all but proposed that he be tarred and feathered, live on C-SPAN. Ultimately, Lieberman got off with a slap on the wrist.

But what about the rest of those "McCain Democrats"? Like Lieberman, few of them are suffering. Maybe it's because Obama himself says he is uninterested in partisan payback. Or maybe it's because winners can afford to be gracious. Whatever the reason, most Dems who endorsed McCain have managed to patch things up with friends and fans. "I don't think people have been lording it over me," says former Rhode Island state Sen. David Carlin, who endorsed McCain in May 2008 in an article in Commonweal. "It's not as if I've been going to bed weeping every night."

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"There's been a little crowing going on," says Mark Erwin, an ambassador in the Clinton administration who campaigned for McCain in 2008. But of the responses he received, he estimates that only about 5 percent were outright nasty. "One person called me a bigot, another person called me a traitor," he said. He doesn't think the endorsement damaged future job prospects—after all, he calls Hillary Clinton a "good friend." Still, a plum ambassadorship under Obama seems unlikely.

There are exceptions to this tendency to let bygones be bygones. Former Obama speechwriter Wendy Button, for example, expected a negative reaction when she endorsed John McCain on the Daily Beast in October. But she didn't anticipate the extent of the hostility. The article earned her a mountain of angry e-mails and, according to a follow-up piece, "even a few creepy phone calls." "You learn who your friends are," Button told me. "Having a dog, especially a Newfoundland, is a good idea."

Since the election, some friends have been willing to put the past behind them. Others, less so. "The phone's really quiet," she says. "Some of the people on the campaign I don't expect to talk to again."

Sympathy came from unlikely places—or likely ones, depending how you look at it. "A day or so after the piece ran, I received a call from [McCain advisers] Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace," Button wrote in an e-mail. "They were both extremely kind and expressed concern about some of the responses I was getting. They were going through their own barrage of BS. The fact that they took the time to call and check in. I won't forget that. They're good people."

Button's case was especially personal: She had worked for Obama (and Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards) in the past and had friends and family on Obama's campaign. (Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman, is her cousin.) So a public break like that may have cut off future job prospects. "Have, say, Democratic Party people reached out or anything like that? No. I don't expect that."

Lady Lynn Forester De Rothschild, a DNC member and major Hillary fundraiser, got a similar reaction when she backed McCain. But she let it slide. "I didn't care then, and I don't care now," she says. Sure, her endorsement probably killed any future involvement in the DNC. But, she says, "I was never interested in the DNC or in politicians as any kind of star to hitch my wagon to. I didn't need it, that's not why I [went into politics]. I did it because I thought it was a great way to help my country."