Jesse Walker, in a recent article in Reason

But if you haven’t forgotten it completely, I’d like you to think back to that last week before the ballot, when many Democrats honestly believed that the polls were undercounting the “youth vote” and that this invisible demographic was going to put them over the top. Pretend, just as an exercise, that this fantasy really happened, and that a bunch of cell-phone-wielding kids elected John Kerry last November. Imagine that for the last six months, the Republicans have been searching their souls and spinning their wheels, trying to find out how they can get those fledgling voters for themselves.

One faction would claim that the best way to appeal to the young would be to muzzle every prominent Republican with a track record of appealing to the old. Another group would argue that the GOP needs to change itself more deeply—that it has to adopt youthful concerns as its own, just as soon as it figures out what those youthful concerns might be.

Yet another would insist the Republicans are already young and hip, and that the trick is to frame their message so the kids will understand this. They’d propose ads announcing that Karl Rove sends text messages, that Dick Cheney knows some real live lesbians, and that W. may be versed in the use of powders, wink wink; that running huge deficits is risky, just like snowboarding, and that Bush’s favorite judges are totally extreme.

He also raises the Mother Jones quote of “worse than conservatives’ pretense of moral superiority is liberals’ pretense of superiority to morals.”

He omits the media creating, and the Dems going along with, this whole artificial demographic of “Evangelical” and “People of Faith” when the perfectly good term “very religious” would do, but on the whole, a very good summation, of this whole crass endeavor.