[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

Somebody told me that Lincoln wasn't the first republican that he was a whig or something like that and that they adopted him as the first Republican.

Lincoln was originally a member, and later a leader, of the Whig Party in Illinois. The Whigs had formed in opposition to President Andrew Jackson. They ran several candidates, including a few winners, but fell apart in the 1850s over the issue of slavery in new territories, with members on both sides. After the dissolution of the Whigs some of their former members helped form the Republican Party in 1854, and their first Presidential candidate was John C. Fremont in 1856.

Speaking of the Republicans and the Democrats do you see them changing?

Constantly.

I sure have ... the DNC has always been for the poor people (at least in Texas and perhaps the whole South) raising taxes and passing welfare reforms and that the Republicans are for the rich lowering the taxes.

Not at all. The Democrats were the ones who supported slavery and post-Civil War oppression, and in the 1950s it was the Democrats who opposed integration and civil rights. The Republicans were the party of Abolition, though as with any group not all members felt the same way. The situation as you describe it is a fairly recent development, and it developed slowly over the decades. In the late 1940s President Harry Truman, described by some as an avowed racists, started Federal legislation which would bring equality to the Armed Forces.

In the 1950s Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey supported the first civil rights legislation in Congress, while his fellow senator John F. Kennedy opposed the bill twice before finally voting for it. At the same time Vice President Richard Nixon was one of the bill's backers. Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson opposed all of Truman's civil rights proposals. President Eisenhower defended segregation in the military but supported some civil rights reforms. He supported school integration in Washington, DC. When Southern Democrats refused to obey the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v The Board of Education, Eisenhower who voiced disapproval for the ruling but still sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce it. On the other side, Southern Governors who supported Brown were Democrats.

At this same time conservative writers like William F. Buckley were starting to be heard, and they were more racist than their Republican forebears. Buckley went so far as to defend the rights of Whites to refuse integration as they were "The advanced race."

By 1960 the major candidates for President, Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon, were both moderates on race. When Kennedy was elected he was not much more supportive of civil rights than he was a decade earlier, but he eventually signed new civil rights legislation.

After Kennedy's assassination, the 1964 candidates were incumbent Lyndon Johnson and Republican opponent Barry Goldwater. Johnson was fairly moderate of civil rights, while Goldwater was a firm opponent. Since that time the Republican Party has become more and more racist, with candidates usually being moderate at best, while the Democrats have intentionally aligned themselves toward black voters, proclaiming civil rights policies as part of their Party agenda.

I know, the question was about Party stances on poverty, not race, but it should be fairly obvious that the two are closely aligned in the policies and ideas of both major parties.
Here is a thorough background for the preceding information:
http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/c...8&context=ojur

I know it's a left and right thing, liberal and not so liberal, but still they seem to be changing.

Constantly. In some areas they are the exact opposite of what they were when the parties were formed. They will continue to change, as one party and then the other try to attract certain types of voters. And that's what both parties are really about - getting elected.