Former Liberal Helps Republican Conviction For Beating Wife Not Considered A Drawback

Liberal Democratic strategist David Ripley has completed his metamorphosis to the conservative right, managing conservative Republican Gary Glenn’s bid to retain his seat on the Ada County Commission.

And Glenn has taken on his one-time political antagonist despite the fact that Ripley is a convicted wife batterer.

Ripley’s troubles will not hamper his ability to provide campaign leadership in the race against Democrat Frank Walker, Glenn maintained.

“What he’s been through in terms of personal challenges does not diminish his political abilities in any way,” Glenn said. He also added, “Winning an election is not the highest of all values.”

Last December, Ripley pleaded guilty to domestic battery on his third wife and was given a 30-day suspended jail sentence and placed on probation for two years. A second domestic violence charge was dismissed. Ripley spent six days in jail at the time of the assault in November 1995, when he was estranged from the woman. The two are now divorcing.

Ripley, 37, was a Democratic strategist who helped Richard Stallings oust veteran GOP Congressman George Hansen by 170 votes in 1984.

He also worked for the Idaho Education Association and had a key role in the Democrats’ 1990 election victory following the wrenching legislative debate on abortion that left Republicans labeled as supporters of what would have been the most restrictive abortion law in the nation.

Now he will being making $500 a month trying to engineer the re-election of Glenn, who spearheaded enactment of the Right to Work ban on mandatory union membership as a condition of continued employment in the mid-1980s.

Ripley began his philosophical shift two years ago when he said turmoil in his personal life prompted him to resign as political director for the teachers association.

Then last year he publicly endorsed even more severe restrictions on abortion than he helped Democrats capitalize on five years earlier.

Aligning himself with the Idaho Citizens Alliance and its anti-homosexual, anti-abortion agenda, he called the pro-choice view he pressed in 1990 “willfully stupid” and said feminism was “the single most deadly philosophy in the world today because it is destroying the family.”