"We Have Always Known That Heedless Self-Interest Was Bad Morals; We Now Know That It Is Bad Economics."

FDR said that.

    We are almost at the end of the longest presidential campaign in history.

     Tales of experience, inexperience, socialists, war heroes, hockey Moms, preachers, plumbers, and '60's radicals are no longer dancing in our heads--they are stampeding.

     We've watched the best and the worst of the American Experience on full, imperfect display.

     Truth, falsehoods, hope, fear, and the truly bizarre psychedelically splash together like drip-period Jackson Pollack.  

     To hear McCain/Palin tell it, the GOP is the Party of the People, and they will restore the notion of America as a shining city on a hill. 

     Nice try.

     The idea that Americans do better under Republican administrations is false, as this graph illustrates (figures provided by the U.S. Census Bureau):

     Also seeming to refute the concept of the GOP as the overwhelming Party Of Business is this graph, courtesy of USA Today, in a piece passed along by TBLMISBT:

      

     Dan Cooper, a proud member of the National Rifle Association, has backed Republicans for most of his life. He's the chief executive of Cooper Arms, a small Montana company that makes hunting rifles.

     Cooper said he voted for George W. Bush in 2000, having voted in past elections for every Republican presidential nominee back to Richard Nixon. In October 1992, he presented a specially made rifle to the first President. Bush during a Billings campaign event.

     This year, Cooper has given $3,300 to the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama. That's on top of the $1,000 check he wrote to Obama's U.S. Senate campaign in 2004, after he was dazzled by Obama's speech at that year's Democratic National Convention.

     Cooper is a player in one of the little-told dramas of the 2008 presidential campaign: how Obama has been able to out-raise Republican John McCain among swaths of the business community, outperforming previous Democratic presidential nominees in drawing business support.

      Click here for the entire article.

       Business interests and progressive politics can and must coexist. "One" or "the other" is no longer good enough.