Until they lose the notion that Americans who are conservative Republicans, are the bigger enemy they face, they’re never going to get anywhere with the American people, because they’re going to sound continually wacko and fringe and so forth — and these young Democrats, I don’t know how many of them there are, start to get it. But as is the case — and this has happened in the Republican Party too. There have been battles for that party. I mean, you go back just as recently as 1994, go back to the ’88 to ’92, my first four years of doing this program, the Republican House delegation may as well have not even been there. These guys, the Democrats, had a majority of over a hundred seats in the House, and the Democrats shut the Republicans out in many committee meetings because it didn’t matter. They didn’t have enough Republicans on those committees to affect the final votes on them anyway, and the Republican leadership was content with all this as long as the Democrats invited them to play golf with them on good golf courses and took them out to some lobbyist dinners to the good stake houses in D.C. and so forth. I’m not kidding you. And that’s what led to what was called the Gingrich revolution. I mean, Newt was one of these back-benchers. I can remember him making special order speeches all the way back to 1984, and getting everybody all riled up and, you know, Reagan during the ’80s, all of that.
Meanwhile, the Republican moderate blue blood country club set was just sitting there happy-go-lucky where they work as they had their little fiefdoms, but they were losers and a bunch of young people were giving birth to new ideas in the party and the same thing is happening now in the Democratic Party. But what’s going to happen is that the ’60s generation of Democrats that’s now matured to adulthood — I mean by age — and in control of the party, they’re just not going to give it up. They are not going to give it up. So this fight’s going to take a while. These young Turks are not going to be able to take over the party immediately. But when they start saying things like “banish Bob Shrum and his tone-deaf Chardonnay populism?” That is an actual quote from one of these Young Turks by the name of Dan Gerstein. He’s a New York City-based consultant with Simmons and — well, he works with Simmons and Powers. These are two other guys, and they’re just fit to be tied over this. So you add them up with MoveOn.org and we have continued battles.
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