Appearing on Fox News “MediaBuzz,” conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer spoke about his political transformation from a Democrat to a conservative, and how he was “mugged by reality.” (VIDEO: Krauthammer: A ‘Disgrace’ That Obama Pals Around With Al Sharpton)

KRAUTHAMMER: I think [The New Republic’s] become less relevant. When I happened to be there in the 1980s, as you well remember, that was their heyday. And in part, it was because we had this mixed eclectic mix. It was in essence a liberal magazine; I was more liberal than I certainly am now. I had been a Democrat in my 20’s, and I spent my 30’s with The New Republic.

HOST HOWARD KURTZ: So you’re a recovering Democrat?

KRAUTHAMMER: I was getting mugged by reality. It was a slow-motion mug, and I came out of it intact and a conservative a decade later. But the foreign policy, I did most of the writing on that and I was always conservative on that.

People don’t remember that in the 1970s, there was a strong conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Pat Moynahan, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, they were called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Committee for the Present Danger… that is where I came out of. Joe Lieberman is the last of those Mohicans, and obviously he had no home in the end.

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KURTZ: You were trained, as you mentioned, as a doctor. Does that influence your political prognostications? Analyzing the sanity of those in the political community, perhaps?

KRAUTHAMMER: Oh, no, it never does. However, my training as an M.D. has made me particularly open to empirical evidence. And when you talked about my evolution from a liberal to a conservative, it isn’t that i had an epiphany, the clouds parting and a shaft of light from the sky. I was open to empirical evidence, on the War on Poverty, the Great Society, which I believed in and saw it didn’t work, at least the evidence I read, and I changed. That is the major influence on my life.