Today I started to read Neil Smith’s Forge of the Elders, and had to chuckle at the names of the spaceships of the American Soviet Socialist Republic: Dole, McCain, Hatch (“three misunderstood and martyred socialist statesmen who had made America what it was today”). When this part was first published (as Contact and Commune), they were Democrats: Metzenbaum, Kennedy, [?].

A few years ago, Neil started saying that he preferred openly-socialist Democrats to crypto-socialist Republicans. I guess this renaming is part of that policy.