Once the loyal wife of a conservative Republican, Arianna Huffington has undergone a very public transformation to her own brand of progressive politics.

I once believed that the private sector—especially conservative multibillionaires who want less government involvement—would rise to the occasion and provide the funding needed to replicate the programs that work, sustain them and bring them to market. One of the changes in my thinking was born of the hard reality I confronted when I tried to raise money for groups and community activists who were good at saving lives but not at raising funds. I sadly discovered how much easier it was raising money for the opera or a fashionable museum. So now, at the same time that I urge—and practice—tithing to poverty fighting, I recognize that the task of overcoming poverty is too monumental to be achieved without the raw power of annual government appropriations.

I also believe more fervently than ever that government dollars, however many trillions of them, will never mend broken lives without citizen engagement....

I now have no political heroes. My heroes are the men and women who are working up-close and personal—sometimes wrenchingly so—to turn lives around. They are the role models I'm exposing my daughters to. Becoming a mother, by the way, has been the most radicalizing experience of all....