By Robyn E. Blumner, Times Columnist
In print: Sunday, June 15, 2008

During Hillary Clinton's gracious concession speech she mentioned that during the 40 years that she's been involved in politics and public life the country has voted 10 times for president, with a Democrat winning the seat only three times.

"Just think how much more progress we could have made over the past 40 years," Clinton said, "if we had a Democratic president."

From the perspective of protecting the environment, expanding access to health care, promoting a progressive energy policy and even fiscal responsibility, I agree with this statement. But it was interesting to read an analysis by Larry Bartels, a professor of politics at Princeton, bearing this out in hard numbers for the daily-grind worker.

Bartels found that the real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast when Democrats were in the White House than when a Republican was president. And for the working poor, their real incomes grew six times as fast under a Democratic president.

In his analysis of six decades of available economic data, Bartels allowed one year for the economic policies of each president to get in gear. He said that the only group for whom partisan politics had little impact was the affluent. Their fortunes grew healthily regardless of party in power.

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/ar...

Just one more reason to get our candidate into office.