The Party of the Rich

"Political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."

    -Dr. John Arbuthnot, English physician, 1667-1735         

The Democrats are fond of saying that Republicans are the party of the rich.  Interestingly, they're anything but as Tom McMahon points out in a September 14 post on his weblog.  The link to CNN's June 13 story accompanying Tom's chart reports the Senate Democrats as five times wealthier than their Republican counterparts.

But that doesn't matter because we know the Republicans are in the pockets of big business and wealthy individuals who make large contributions to their party, don't we?  Oops!  Wrong again!  The Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog organization, published a June 27, 2003 report outlining where both party's contributions come from.

Guess what?  They found that donors who gave less than $200 to political parties contributed 64% to Republicans and only 35% to Democrats.  On the other hand, the big givers who wrote checks for $1,000,000 or more gave 92% to Democrats and only 8% to Republicans.  Democrats got the lion's share of their funds from supporters giving more than $100,000, while Republicans got most of theirs from those giving less than that.

Another not-so-surprising finding was that candidates who outspent their opponents won 94% of the time.  If you've got more money than your challenger it's a very good thing.

So the facts don't support the claims of the minority party that  the GOP is the party of the rich.  Not only is the Democratic leadership considerably wealthier, but the majority of their contributions come from those with deeper pockets. 

And why would the Democrats continue to promulgate such a falsehood?  Why to get the votes of the poor, of course.  Why else?