Well,looks like the DNC rewrote and erased their ugly past from their platform. This from WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-opening-night-of-the-democratic-convention/2012/09/05/ec50ad84-f73d-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_blog.html For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers rights, and womens rights. from a history of the Democratic Party, on DNC Web site . A number of readers asked about this brief (20 paragraphs or so) history of the Democratic party, especially the first sentence. It certainly appears to ignore the partys long and troubled history with race, literally leaping from the 200 years phrase to 1920, when the womens suffrage amendment was enacted. The Web history mentions the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson in helping pass the 19th Amendment, without noting that he was a racist or that he repressed civil liberties even to the point of jailing one of his rivals for the presidency in 1914 (socialist Eugene Debs). The history also highlights the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Certainly President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, played an essential role, but it is worth remembering that 80 percent of the no votes in the Senate came from Democrats, including the late Robert Byrd (W.Va.) and Albert Gore (Tenn.), father of the future vice president. Republican votes, in fact, were essential in winning final passage of the bill. Of course, a quick little Web history does not give much space for such details. A more unvarnished perspective was presented in the 1992 book, Of the People, which Democrats distributed at the convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That book, written by real historians, obviously has a slant, but it found the space to mention such historical blemishes. For instance, it acknowledged that before the Civil War the party played both sides of the slavery issue and after the Civil War, the party reached out a welcoming hand to returning Confederates, not to blacks.
