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Kevin Drum needs a chart to grasp "zeitgeist."

Washington Monthly

The theory behind [the New York Times article/chart], I guess, is that the political climate when you're age 20 affects your party preference for your entire life. The hypothesis would go something like this: popular presidents produce a swing among 20-year-olds to their own party, and unpopular ones produce a swing in the other direction....

Of course, what's really most remarkable about the chart is the fantastic shift toward the Democrats in the 20-30 age group. The delta among this cohort between Democrats and Republicans is about +15 in the Democrats' favor, a bigger number than even the Vietnam/Watergate generation. It looks to me like the Christian right's social neanderthalism is causing the Republican Party to lose a generation forever.

Duh. But hey now, Kev. Walk back the cat. It takes a village to enable a wayward child. Plenty of professional Republican folks viewed the faith crowd as merely the wobbly wheel on the shopping cart. David Kuo so plainly points out the obviousness of the thing on 60 minutes, "taking Jesus and reducing him to some... "precinct captain!"

But it was a mainstream Republican shopping cart, just the same way there's no denying that Jim Wright and his House Bank check-kiting band of fools in the 80s laid the groundwork for a Republican revolution in '94. They had stopped walking the talk and got too lobby-friendly. Perhaps the only differences, and I guess, large ones, are that Wright and Co were pikers compared to the now-MBA-level corruption machine and that this crew has had ALL the levers to themselves for at least 6 years. The mess is commensurate with their single-minded effiency.

No, this is a FUBAR that rests squarely on the shoulders of ground-based Republicans--the ones who did obviously un-conservative things while wearing the uniform and holding up the foam #1 fingers, and on the shoulders of those who voted for same and excused it, the voters who stood by watching their "if only we had a chance" ideals being whittled away by human fallibility. This is the unregulated market at work--as the pendulum swings it makes an horrific mess of the clockbbox. We have a representative government, Kevin, and there's no finer litmus for our virtue than our politics.

And yeah, Kev, you're late. This is gonna be generational.

...If I was George Bush, I wouldn't want a second term. It will destroy the viability of a Republican President, and possibly his party, for 20 years. Too bad. And ironic. In running away from his daddy's shadow, he severed contact with the one man who perhaps could have saved him from himself.