Why I Am A Democrat

I have heard people ask, in apparent confusion: "Just what does the Democratic Party stand for?"

There should be no confusion. Here is what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said about it in 1932:

"There are two ways of viewing the Government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776
But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party."

Here is what presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan said about it in 1896:

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it."

From Thomas Jefferson to the present day, the central idea of the Democratic Party has been to achieve "the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens."