OK, I have a bone to pick here and a soapbox to mount. While Baby Boomers is a term often used to cover everyone born between 1946 and 1964, actual demographers (as opposed to pop culture talking heads) now use the term to mean only those between 1946 and 1953 (or 1954), while those born 1954-1964 are demoted to such names as Generation Jones (how anonymous) or Shadow Boomers (defining them as shadows of their older siblings).

Those of us in Gen Jones are tired of being tarred with the Baby Boomer brush, which doesn't really apply.

When my daughter was about 18 months old, I was entertaining the idea of moving to the lower-48 in the Southern regions (yes, it was February in Anchorage).  For the heck of it, I was checking out some "live-in" positions where high-powered, type-A folks were looking for personal assistants to be at their beck-and-call.  I started talking to a nice, older couple...a retired oil exec and his wife who were heavily involved in foundations, fundraising and event planning.  The position would have been perfect!  I sent them my resume, samples of my writing and made sure they knew I had an 18-month-old daughter.

They were impressed with my abilities and tickled at the thought of having a child in the house again.  It really looked like this was going somewhere.  As a proud mama, I decided to send them a picture of Morrigan and I together.

That evening, I received a curt (at first) phone call saying they were no longer interested in my services.  

My Congressperson is a...

1. Democrat who has a safe seat

2. Democrat in a possibly Republican challengable seat; help keep this one!

3. Republican in an, alas, safe seat.

4. Republican in a possibly Democratic challengable seat; help change this one!

This connects to a couple different things...

Why you come to Daily Kos?  Some come here just for the politics, anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war.  Some are here because they are from an otherwise deeply Repuglican area and need the community. Others like me come here from an already all Blue area, hoping to help reach out and be able to do something useful.

Also I want to refocus some attention from the Presidential race and towards the need for more & better Democrats in the House. We may wish to consider giving money to strategically targeted House races via ActBlue, to those Democrats where our limited dollars can have the most bang for the buck in increasing our margin in Congress.

If you think that this an imortant and timely discussion, please Rec this diary.

In an otherwise typically simplistic and uninformative column, David Brooks outlined exactly why the Republican Party as currently composed will do everything within its power to win this election.

"The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy?"

This is what I wrote in the last Roll Call diary on February 29, 2008:

Alright, the greatest primary contest in all history is nearly over (in my opinion)....

Wow.  Was I off, or what?  It reminds me of a Simpsons episode where the evil Mr. Burns, while speaking to his ancient 125 year old mother, says: "I'm sorry I pulled the plug on you mother.  Who knew you would pull through ...and live.... for another five decades."

Yes, now I can say that our long historic primary season is over.

Finally.

As we ramp down from that battle and ramp up to Netroots Nation in July and the Democratic convention in August, now is the perfect time to everyone to get to know everyone again.

This is what happens when the yapping bobble-heads in the press start to believe their own shallow narratives. The specific narrative in this case is the "Obama has a Latino problem," or the variant, "Hispanics won't vote for an African American." It first took root during the lead up to NV, then really took off in CA. Unfortunately it only got reinforced as Senator Clinton continued to be the preferred Democratic candidate among Latinos.

That led the FUD to continue to be slathered on in thick, creamy chunks as the "chicken littles" on the Left ate it up, buying into the false logic of "If A is less than B, A is also less than C." There were absolutely no facts being offered to back up that conclusion, but it damn sure never stopped anyone from reaching it.

As in recent Tuesdays, given today's other events, I decided to do a purely fun poll today. We previously did Worst Presidents pre-1945 covering George Washington to Herbert Hoover; but now is the time to ask worst president from Roosevelt to the other George W.

It is better if the "Demographic Tuesdays" community demographic polls stay up in the Recommended Diary list all day so that they can get an equivalent sample of us - morning to night, west & east coast.

And today did not seem like a good day to ask for that... but it is a good day to ask about what has been bad about recent presidents, even the Democrats.  

Before just checking George W. Bush, please do think about how bad some of the others were, what was bad, and even how they set precedents for George W. Bush.

Crossposted at trueconservative.typepad.com.

The most compelling demographic analysis I've seen lately: Alan Abramowitz's "The Incredible Shrinking Republican Base" on Real Clear Politics.

Short story: White Married Christians--the combined demographic--is and has been the base of Republicans' victories. Ignore income. Ignore gender. Ignore age. If you're white, married, and Christian, the odds are six or seven in ten that you'll vote Republican.

More below.

Yesterday the AP published an article about the last remaining Democratic primaries, in which the author madde a breezy, unsupported assertion that South Dakota's demographics are a lot like West Virginia, and therefore favor Hillary.  As a South Dakotan who follows politics, I found his basic premise so far off I wondered if he bothered to do even the slightest amount of work.

Putting a great big roadblock to the "electability" argument trotted out by Hillary and her supporters, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman has this to say in an NYT op-ed today:

Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, State, National Guard, Reserves, or other uniform service such as Public Health Srevice or NOAA Corps?

This seemed to be a good topic after Memorial Day.

Sorry, cub scouts does not count?

Since there is no primary today, I am considering this a real Demgraphic Tuesdays poll, and am asking everybody to keep it on the "Recommended List" for the next 24 hours, through Wednesday morning. We did this subject a year ago but polled only briefly and incompletely. As always, it's best if this poll stays up as a "Recommended Diary" for a full 24 hours, so that it will get an equivalent sample of us - morning to night, east & wst coast. So please click on Recommend.

And here is link to Netroots Support for out Troops

In order to get a more realistic look at how the gender biases are affecting the Democratic race, I analyzed voting/polling results from each state in which exit/entrance polls could be found.

For each state, I recorded the overall polled Male/Female percentage of voters who participated in the Democratic contests. I then recorded the candidate-specific Male/Female percentages for both Hillary and Barack to obtain each candidate's actual percentages of Male/Female votes won based on the total number of votes cast.

Why do we always hear in TV about the 18-49 demo?  Because winning them as a customer means that you have a customer for the next generation, not just a single purchase. This is why purely from a rational perspective most Democratic politicians have come to support Obama rather than Clinton because his strength tends to be concentrated among expanding rather than contracting groups of voters.  In short, while it is somewhat difficult to forecast whether Clinton or Obama has a higher percentage of winning the 2008 election in a matchup with McCain, it is quite clear that the Obama coalition has the potential to be a winning one for the next generation, the Clinton coalition seems geered primarily to win this election alone and will become increasingly less viable in subsequent elections as the demographic groups she tends to fair best among contract as a share of the electorate.

As we are all made painfully, ridiculously aware on a daily basis, there is only one type of voter that matters in these United States anymore...

The hallowed "white, working-class voter" AKA "Reagan Democrat".

Yes, just as we've learned that most states no longer matter, now we are learning through the immeasurable wisdom of the Clinton campaign, with an assist from the ever-repetitive MSM, that there is only one type of voter who matters--at least, if you're Barack Obama.

Let's take a little peek inside this notion, which lies at the heart of Hillary Clinton's "more electable" myth, shall we?

I used to be, and by all common stereotypes I fit the bill to the Tee.  These are the demographic traits I possess that, if viewed on their own, would suggest to political observers that "this guy has got to be in the GOP."

I:

Am Male (yes, I have a penis)
Am White, and was raised in a very homogenously white area.
Live in a "Red" state (though not for too much longer)
Have a household income of 100K+
Have a large majority of conservative family including in-laws
Fell under the Rush Limbaugh hypnosis at age 14
Once subscribed to National Review
Have been closely observing a Democratic party that can’t nor have ever been able to really coalesce into a unified front
Did not have any major parental or familial influence in liberal philosophy growing up
Thoroughly enjoy a good single malt scotch

Follow me below the fold to see where I’m going with this.  

Sea-change.  I think this change is a good thing.  That is what we are seeing amongst the Democrats these days, and it's about freakin' time.  But, the Republicans aren't the only ones not 'getting it.'

This topic came up today in a conversation I had with a co-worker who is a male, unmarried Boomer.  It pissed me off, as a single parent who busts her butt ever day to keep out of poverty and who works just as hard as he does, probably harder.   He isn't going to retire for five more years, he says, because if he stays he can make an extra $350,000.   Geebus!  I'll be lucky if my pension is intact in 15 years when it's my turn to retire.  I'll be lucky if someone just like this guy doesn't gut it while I am still here so he can float down to the Bahamas in his golden freakin' parachute.   It made me want to cry and alternately pull my hair out!

A lot of these Boomers were also Republicans, who managed to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' only to make it impossible for anyone else do to it in their lifetime.   A Boomer is president now, and while not representative of all Boomers, he's certainly not atypical.  

Last November, James Fields won a State Representative Seat in Cullman, Alabama. Now of course that made national news because he was a black candidate in a 96 percent white county.

I do not know if the national leaders took notice or if they found that race to be an anomaly. I have one race in mind again that I have been posting on daily where that could happen again. Vivian Davis Figures, running for U.S. Senate, can be that same type of victor.

http://www.dailykos.com/...

Vivian Davis Figures For U.S. Senate - Alabama

There has been some rumblings here, as well as in the main-stream media, that Hillary Clinton knows that this race is over.  But she is hanging on in hopes of damaging Barack Obama so badly that he loses the general election and she can run as the "I told you so" candidate.

More below the fold...