Howard Dean Says Tea Party Has A Serious Problem With The Younger Generation...

NiceDeb - Howard Dean shared his thoughts on the Tea Party with reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, this morning.

Among other things, he said that it is “the last gasp of the 55-year-old generation,”and argued that “the Tea Party has a problem with the younger generations”.

“You all have friends of different races, different religions, and different sexual orientations, and you all date each other,” he said to hypothetical members of the “new” generation. “Well that’s not how I grew up, and that’s not how the Tea Party grew up. The Tea Party is almost entirely over 55 and white. And the country has changed dramatically as a result of what happened in 2008.”

Howard Dean himself, born November 17, 1948, is 62 years old, which, according to Michael Barone’s piece in the DC Examiner, is slightly older than the average age of Dems in the House:

…the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2. That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent-plus Democratic districts survived.

So those new Tea Party Republicans must be positively ancient, right? White, and geriatric, these new Republicans must be positively stymied by confusing “new” concepts like acceptance of “different races, different religions and different sexual orientations”.
-
Wait…

The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening today is 54.9, younger than the Republicans’ average age in the previous Congress, 56.5.

A difference of 5.3 years between Republicans and Democrats in the 112th Congress.
-
It turns out that the old school, Big Government Dem Socialists are the ones who are out of touch with the young whippersnappers in the tea party.
Barone cites scholar Walter Russell Mead:

“The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them.”

Mead is looking back on the America of World War II and the postwar decades, when American life was dominated by the leaders of what I have called the Big Units — big government, big business, big labor. The assumption was that these units would grow ever bigger, to the benefit of ordinary people.

That assumption was shared by the Democratic leaders of the just-departed 111th Congress, who grew up in Big Unit America. They passed a $787 billion stimulus package on the assumption that big government would put people to work. They passed the health care bill on the assumption that centralized experts in big government could provide better care at lower costs.

The voters in November 2010 rejected those assumptions.

Howard Dean needs to work on his talking points.

RELATED:

71 year old Steny Hoyer (born June 14, 1939) has his own take on the tea party: Tea Party People Come From Unhappy Families.

There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise. My presumption is they have unhappy families. All of you have been in families: single-parent, two-parents, whatever. Multiple parent and a stepfather. The fact is life is about trying to reach accommodation with one another so we can move forward. That is certainly what democracy is about. So if we are going to move forward compromise is necessary.


These Dem hepcats are all about compromise, now, aren’t they?