What does "change one's stripes" exactly mean?
I found a phrase in the headline of today’s Washington Post article (Feb. 14) that reads "Mubarak loyalists change stripes to fit into the new Egypt." Though I interpreted the meaning of change one’s stripes as change sides, I wasn’t sure.
I checked up dictionaries at hand. No dictionary carries change stripes.
So I checked online dictionaries of free Merriam-webster, Cambridge dictionary online, and the thesaurus. com. None of them carries change stripe, except reference.com says refer to “Leopard cannot change its spots”, which seems to me not applicable to the implication of the phrase used in the above headline.
Can anybody tell me the exact meaning of change stripes? Does stripe mean a flag? Is this phrase well-established, though none of dictionary I've checked registers this phrase?
I found this reference in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) by Christine Ammer:
leopard cannot change its spots, a Also the tiger cannot change its stripes. One can't change one's essential nature. For example, He's a conservative, no matter what he says; the leopard cannot change its spots. These metaphoric expressions both originated in an ancient Greek proverb that appears in the Bible (Jeremiah 13:23): “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” It was first recorded in English in 1546.
The wording of this entry remains unchanged in the second edition of Ammer's dictionary (2013).
In the case of Mubarak supporters, the writer is implying that—more than changing sides—they're changing (or appearing to change) their very natures. Having once supported the man and his regime, they're now adopting a different coloration as a way to protect themselves in a society that's still reverberating with revolutionary shockwaves. The more common negative usage—that animals (and presumably humans) cannot change their stripes any more than their essential natures—is slightly more common than the positive usage employed here, but both meanings are widely understood.
Safire's Political Dictionary p.722
(…) to change stripes is to make an (almost) irrevocable decision to cross the street to the other party; however, to sit it out or to go fishing means to remain within the party without supporting — but not publicly rejecting — its candidate in a particular election.
To change one's political affiliation/ political views (in adaptation to changes).