A gifted orator and presidential candidate once said the
following: 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. Obviously that
wasn’t Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, since it was uttered in,
well, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention. That’s how
long Americans have been fighting the fight against trickle-down
economics, and that’s how long the Democratic Party has
associated itself with the masses, “those below.” But Democrats
weren’t always defenders of the low-flying hoi polloi. Before
William Jennings Bryan, who at 36 became the youngest
presidential candidate in history, Democrats tended to be
conservative and favor a teensy-weensy government, a government
so small that moneyed interests could have their w