I am passing this on because these guys are right on the money.
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By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — They are opining, organizing and running for party chairman. A wave of young Democrats is demanding not just to be heard but to take charge.
"This generation is looking for ways to participate because we're tired of losing," says Jamal Simmons, 33, a consultant who has worked for presidential hopeful Wesley Clark and several other Southern candidates.
Simmons and his fellow "Young Turks" worry about the Democratic Party's dependence on interest groups, their relations with minority groups, the stereotypes that they are weak on defense and values, the Republican appropriation of the "reformer" label and the swaths of America that Democrats seem to have written off.
Young Democrats believe that the party is dominated by people who came of age politically in the 1960s, and it's time for them to make room for new ideas and new voices. Theirs.
"We respect the struggles of the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and Vietnam, but (we) are not defined by those struggles," says Kirsten Powers, 37, a New York-based strategist and commentator for Fox News. "We want to take what is good in liberalism and make it better, and get rid of what is not working."
Simon Rosenberg, 41, founder and president of the centrist New Democrat Network, says people his age have had different formative experiences: Ronald Reagan's presidency and the rise of the GOP; Bill Clinton's reshaping of the Democratic Party in 1992 as anti-crime and pro-welfare-reform; and the flowering of the Internet.
Rosenberg says those factors and his experience running a national organization make him the right person to head the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which will elect a new chairman in February. But some see his age as a drawback. Though he's four years older than Ken Mehlman, recently named chairman of the Republican National Committee, "people are telling me that I'm too young," Rosenberg says.
Powers says she became a television commentator partly because of the dearth of young Democrats in that role. "I go on against a lot of young Republicans, young conservatives," she says. "There's not enough energy and new blood in the Democratic Party."
Jenny Backus, 36, a consultant to the DNC, says many thirtysomethings had significant roles in the last campaign. But she says there are at most 20 people younger than 40 on the 447-member DNC, and she says the next chairman needs to fix that. "Now is a great time for people to start speaking out," she says.
Simmons, Powers and New York City-based consultant Dan Gerstein have been three of the bluntest commentators. "The party in certain respects is fossilized," says Gerstein, 37. "It's trapped in the last vestiges of the New Deal coalition. That coalition is no longer an electoral majority or even close to it."
A former aide to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., Gerstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats have "fallen right back into the elitist, weak-kneed, brain-dead trap" they thought they'd escaped with Bill Clinton.
He called for more muscle in foreign policy, more respect for religion and "banishing Bob Shrum and his tone-deaf Chardonnay populism" from future presidential campaigns. Shrum, 61, was nominee John Kerry's top adviser.
Gerstein is among the many concerned about the Democrats' image. "We've lost the mantle of reform we had for the whole 20th century after Franklin Roosevelt," says Matt Bennett, 39, a former Clark aide and co-founder of a new group called Third Way. "We are seen as defenders of an old system that no longer meets the needs of the 21st century world we live in."
Simmons, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, targeted Democrats who show up in black churches "every Sunday before an election" and believe "red states" that voted Republican are filled with "backward looking 'religious nuts.' "
In an interview, Simmons says Republicans have more contact with the African-American church community between elections than Democrats do. That's dangerous for Democrats, he says, and so is making appeals based on history.
"When people get together for Thanksgiving or at the barbershop, they don't talk about affirmative action or sit-ins," Simmons says. "They talk about what's going on at work, how to get their kid into a better school, how they're trying to buy a house or start a business."
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About time some one has seen the light, I just hope the DNC will follow it. But hay, I think the Republicans would be more then glad to remain in power until the Veitnam Era Dems finaly die off of old age.
That's My Two Cents