Change Template for a Content
I ended up using "template suggestions" feature of drupal 7.  Now I only have one content type called Article Page.  I added a custom field to it called field_template, which takes the name of the template i want to use not including the page-- prefix and not including the .tpl.php suffix.  So if field_template has the value 'landingpage', then the template will be 'page--landingpage.tpl.php';

Then in my ~/sites/all/themes/THEMENAME/template.php file, I wrote the following function

function THEMENAME_process_page(&amp;$variables) {
  if (array_key_exists('node', $variables))
  {
        if($variables['node']-&gt;field_template['en'][0]['value'])
        {
        $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'] = array('page__'.$variables['node']-&gt;field_template['en'][0]['value']);
        }
        else
        $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__'. $variables['node']-&gt;type;
  }
}


Replace THEMENAME with the name of your theme.