A hundred and forty years ago, the roles were reversed.
We hear this a lot, but it isn't entirely true. For example, in 1856 as in 2008 the Republican party is at its very core the party of 'big business'. It's just that a lot of the issues surrounding that goal have changed -- supporting business in the 19th century meant opposing slavery in order to break the agrarian south's 90-year stranglehold on politics... today it means arguing for a particular sort of tax system. The overall intent hasn't changed - we just forget the initial purpose because the side effect was so noble.
(Similarly, I probably don't have to tell you that all the 19th century rhetoric about 'states rights' on the part of the Southern Democrats was disingenuous -- the party supported social programs through the Federal government from very early on. A lot of those things aren't recognizable to us at this point, because we don't assosciate Indian relocation, preserving slavery in the territories and prohibition in the same breathe as social security, medicare and civil rights... but they're similar sweeping uses of the Federal government.)
So: the famous 'switch' your parents and grandparents talk about isn't so much in party ideology as it is in geographic support. Lyndon Johnson threw the party's support behind the civil rights movement in the 1960s... which effectively ended a hundred and fifty years of Southern states voting Democrat and a century of Democrats treading very carefully when it came to worrying about offending the south. The practical effect was more that it transferred the 'divide' from one party to the others - for the past forty years the Republicans have had to check their rhetoric to maintain that voting bloc...
I kinda understand the one with the red elephant. Red is a main color of the US-flag, an elephant is a strong animal (perhaps not fully suitable because there are no elephants in the US, except those in a zoo or something like that) But there are elephants in africa, maybe they do like the african americans!
The symbols are self-effacing -- they were first used to represent the parties by political cartoonists in the 1870s (during Reconstruction). As in Germany, donkeys represent stupidity... and elephants are slow, overly large and lumbering. The colors aren't actually used by the parties, they come from the recent elections where the TV news used red to represent states voting Republican and blue to represent ones voting Democrat (the actual 'animal logos' are red, white and blue for both parties). For example, you might notice that all the McCain signage is predominantly blue. Red is hard to use in advertising... and used unsparingly it's still assosciated with Communism.
Also, the parties have changed over time, to the point that members of the party from one era may not even recognize those of another era as being part of the same party. I suspect that the parties of, for example, the WW2 generation would have more than a few disagreements with those of this generation, to the point of "what the hell did you do to my party?!".
More than that, time and tides effect what a party will do in any real world sense. No matter how much Reagan might have believed in small government, it wasn't something he could even begin to fight for while trying to win an arms race with the Russians. On an even more basic level, stated ideology never trumphs practical roles... the different branches of government will always put maintaining (and increasing) their power above the core beliefs of men who died a century or more ago.
Yes, but Republicans tend to make a bigger point of being Christians and have integrated a lot of Christian morality into their political platform.
Here's the thing that bugs me about most about modern campaigns: everyone involved in the process is smart enough to know that it's mindless lip service, on both sides. It's a zero sum game because our system of balances means that the court gets the final say on any of this 'morality legislation'. Watch this year and see how excited the pro-choice/pro-life groups get. Everyone is at eachothers throats over something that... can't be changed. Neither executive nor legislature may effect Roe v Wade - so when I see Obama talking about how he'll protect that right and McCain talking about how he'll appoint judges that will change the law I know that they're both consciously lying to me.
The court, as with the other two branches, is more interested in its own legitimacy. Unlike the other two, its specifics and role aren't even protected by the Constitution... so it is very, very conscious of issue controversial rulings. More importantly, it is not beholden to anyone as the judges are appointed for life. We have seven-out-of-nine judges appointed by 'conservative' Presidents right now and the sky isn't falling - because they're independant operators not controlled by a party, because they go through (what is now) an extremely moderating confirmation and because their job requires that they legislate based on precedent rather than personal interest. The only way to change our abortion ruling is to have another case come up for discussion and for there to be extremely compelling evidence to support a change. Otherwise the system falls apart and all involved know it (Tte President knows that he can not collude with the court, regardless of ability or desire -- it ruined Buchanan's presidency on *day two* and later almost destroyed the then-popular Roosevelt.)
