It's time to pass torch, younger Dems say

[Rose Siding]

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.
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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."
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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.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2004-12-16-dem-turks_x.htm