re-take City Hall. After graduating from Penn Law, he opened up a title insurance agency with his brother Wally, before being appointed, at age 29, by the administration of President George H.W. Bush to serve as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Regional Administrator for Philadelphia Region III (consisting of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia) under Secretary Jack Kemp. After supporting only Republican presidential candidates for three decades, Smerconish publicly broke with the GOP and endorsed Barack Obama for president on October 19, 2008. In a 2,000-word essay for Salon titled "Why this lifelong Republican may vote for Obama," citing the Republican Party's failure to capture Osama bin Laden after seven years of war, he wrote, "All of this drives me bat-shit, and it just might drive me into the Obama camp. That'd be quite a departure." He has urged the Republican Party to pursue "moderation on social issues in order to advance a suburban agenda for the GOP." Writing a 2010 op-ed for The Washington Post titled "On cable TV and talk radio, a push toward polarization," Smerconish said, "Buying gas or groceries or attending back-to-school nights, I speak to people for whom the issues are a mixed bag; they are liberal on some, conservative on others, middle of the road on the rest. But politicians don't take their cues from those people. No, politicians emulate the world of punditry." On February 21, 2010, he announced in a newspaper column that he had left the Republican Party. Discussing Smerconish's move to the middle, Manuel Roig-Franzia of The Washington Post wrote, "It may be conventional wisdom that the only way to truly succeed in the world of talk is to occupy one of the poles. But Smerconish is betting his career that there's a great untapped center." Smerconish voted for neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election. Legal Smerconish's tenure at HUD came to a close after George H.W. Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. In 1993, Smerconish began what would become a decade practicing law with legendary trial attorney James E. Beasley, who would become the benefactor and eponym of the Temple University Beasley School of Law. Smerconish became acquainted with Beasley while at HUD when he sought the latter's legal opinion for a possible defamation action against Steve Lopez, then a