In my case, most certainly, although to be honest I was never anything that would even approach "bleeding heart". It's easy to be more liberal as a younger person because, for the most part, someone else is paying your way. It isn't until you become an adult responsible for your own survival that you begin to learn exactly what liberalism is. When you realize that all the programs that liberals espouse are paid for by money that is taken from your pocket, you see exactly how unfair the whole idea is. For all the lofty goals and flowery terms used to describe the philosophy, at the core it is a system that takes from one group and gives to another, in an effort to cultivate a loyal base of voters for the Democrat party. Uneducated, unmotivated and taught that government is there to provide for them, very few ever escape the system. The older I get, the more conservative I become.