The Outsider
I’m from Hobart, Indiana,” says Dan Butler proudly, offering a crushing handshake that hints at the fact that he wrestled Division One in college.

“It’s a pretty small town. It’s all white, all blue-collar, working-class guys,” he says. “A lot of people there work in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. It’s a very heavily Democratic county.”

Political passions, however, were a bit more nuanced inside the Butler home. “My father was an auto mechanic who always took a Republican line on being friendly to the small-business owner. My mother, a housewife, is a Democrat.” Eventually, Butler found himself drawn more to his father’s beliefs, and the Republican mantra of raising yourself up by the bootstraps.

So that’s what Butler, now 27, decided to do. He went away to the University of Pennsylvania, and upon graduation in 1999 moved to New York to work at a small trading company with a seat on the American Stock Exchange. Once he left Wall Street for the day, he would find himself on the defensive at social functions. “I think one of the hardest things to deal with is openly saying you’re a Republican and not being attacked at a dinner party,” Butler says. “I was recently at a wedding in which everyone was trying to bait me for a Bush-bashing. They were all saying, ‘Why do you like President Bush?’ At first, I got suckered in. I thought they really wanted to know!”

Then he joined the New York Young Republicans Club. “I joined right before September 11 and got extremely active right afterward,” says Butler. “On September 11, I was right there.” He ran for safety along the East River after the first tower collapsed just north of his office.

“Al Qaeda always saw us running. They saw us getting out in Somalia, in Lebanon,” Butler says. “I think they really ran into a brick wall when they ran into President George Bush. You see President Bush walk into a room, it looks like he’s got six guns on his hips. That resonates with many Americans.”

Maxine Friedman: "It's about saying that you don't have to be afraid if you want to be Republican," she says of Lead 21's fund-raising mixers.   (Photo: Nathaniel Welch)

The Convert
Maxine Friedman is just the sort of person you’d want to help you sell any message. And it’s just as well, because Friedman is here to convert. Tall, blonde and glamorous, she moved to Manhattan in 2002 to take a promotion within the marketing division of CB Richard Ellis, the corporate-real-estate firm. More noticeable to her fellow Republicans, however, Friedman came here to spread the gospel of a California-based conservative group called Lead 21.

Lead 21 was founded in serious Clinton-Gore country—San Francisco—three years ago. “It was about planting a flag in the Bay Area, saying that you don’t have to be afraid if you want to be Republican,” Friedman explains. Lead 21 mixers were a place for serious conservatives to trade ideas with Dinesh D’Souza and former California governor Pete Wilson.

The group targets affluent young professionals, particularly those in the media and finance. While Friedman, 30, fits seamlessly into that crowd, she does have views that tend to raise eyebrows among some of her new friends in the city. “I have been a Christian—I’d say a strong Christian—for about four years. I’m not a Jerry Falwell, crazy, in-your-face Evangelical,” she says. “But I’m scared a little bit for our country. I’m scared about the slipping social ethic.”

Friedman, thus, is firmly anti-abortion and anti–gay marriage. “The whole gay-rights thing is hard for me,” she says sheepishly. “I have a ton of gay friends. I have a gay aunt. I have a transvestite uncle. I want what’s best for them. It’s tough for me. But, you know, I believe what the Bible says. That’s the Word for me.”

Friedman was raised in Los Altos, California, an only child, but part of a big, and very Democratic, family. “My mom’s one of thirteen children, a big Catholic family. My parents were strong liberal Democrats. And I was, too, growing up.”

Her “epiphany moment” came during the federal lockout of 1993. “All I could think of was how much money they were wasting, and I kept getting angrier and angrier about it. I felt like Bill Clinton was just so weak. He’s articulate. He’s a good orator. But he never seemed totally wholehearted on any issue. He was so soft.”

Friedman insists that her political views are not a problem for her as she explores life in the East. “If anything, I find that people in New York kind of like the fact that you have an opinion. I really haven’t faced too many arguments at dinner parties so far,” she says. “But maybe that’s because I’m hanging out with too many Republicans.”