Carpetbagger: Encyclopedia II - Carpetbagger - Contemporary use

Carpetbagger - Contemporary use

Carpetbagger - In the United States

Current use is infrequent, and tends to be confined to American politics. When used, the term "carpetbagger" is used to describe "an outsider who moves someplace to exploit the natives and enrich himself at their expense," or "politicians who move to a new jurisdiction solely to meet a residency requirement for holding public office."

In 2000, Republican political commentator Alan Keyes referred to Democrat Hillary Clinton as a "carpetbagger" when she moved to New York to run for the United States Senate. The accusation ended up coming back to politically hurt Keyes in 2004, when he ran for a Senate seat from Illinois, having moved from Maryland to Illinois only one month before the election, which he lost. See also: parachute candidate

The term is also used in a more jocular manner to refer to the masses of northerners who have relocated to the South since the 1960s, concurrent with the decline of the Rust Belt in the Northeast and Midwest. The word is commonly used in areas of massive influx such as Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas. The Raleigh suburb of Cary, North Carolina is commonly referred to as a Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees.

Carpetbagger - In the United Kingdom

Carpetbagging was also used in the United Kingdom in the 1990s during the wave of flotations of building societies (mutuals), the term indicating the advocates of these conversions. Investors in these mutuals would receive shares in the new public companies, usually distributed at a flat rate, thus equally benefiting small and large investors, and providing a broad incentive for members to vote for conversion-advocating (carpetbagging) leadership candidates. The word was first used in this context by the chief executive of one of the building societies under threat, who introduced rules removing new savers' entitlement to potential windfalls and stated in a press release, "I have no qualms about disenfranchising carpetbaggers."

Major building societies which converted included Northern Rock, Halifax, Bradford and Bingley and Woolwich.

In the 2005 general election, Respect MP George Galloway was accused of being a carpet-bagger by Labour's Constitutional Affairs Minister David Lammy during an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Galloway, who hails from Scotland, ran for office in London's Bethnal Green and Bow constitutency on an anti-war platform. It was suggested that he targeted this constituency because of its largely Muslim population, pushing the issue of war in Iraq for his own gain while ignoring the basic concerns facing this area, one of the UK's poorest constituencies. His response was that his old constituency had been dissolved and that it is perfectly reasonable for a new party to stand its best known candidate in the area it has the strongest support.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Contemporary use", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki