"The moment the door clicked shut, Dominic felt a rush of claustrophobia. It made no difference that the walls were see-through. This was a vacuum-sealed room. That meant there was no outside source of air. What was already present inside when they shut the door was it. There was no background noise whatsoever. The silence was so absolute that Dominic could hear himself breathing. It gave him the creeps."

When I wrote that passage for a thriller called Tightrope (Penguin Putnam 1999), I was referring to a specialized room called a Faraday cage, a Plexiglass, acrylic-lined, copper-wire mesh encased room specially designed to completely shield all radio frequency transmissions.

In other words, a bug-proof room even Dick Cheney would be proud of.

Recently, I had a flashback to that scene while sitting in a darkened den with my conservative Republican dad and step-mom, watching Bill O'Reilly on television.

Trapped, in a claustrophobic vacuum-sealed room where free-thinking ideas and intelligent discourse are shielded from going out or coming in.

My dear little step-mother, who is one of the sweetest people I know and devoted to my dad, never watches the news, but she also never misses Bill O'Reilly.

God help her, he is her entire source of information on current events.

When she looked at me and said, "He presents a very fair and balanced point of view," there was absolutely no irony in her words. She meant it.

Dear Reader, I tried to be nice. I'm just not real good at it.

I said, "Yeah, RIGHT. Fair and balanced in his own little pea-brain."

Her eyes rounded, and she said, "But he always invites people to the show who disagree with him."

I pointed out that, yes, he did, but he also talked over or shouted down those people when they actually made a point he didn't want to hear.

Without hesitation, she said firmly, "Well, he tells it like it is."

Not since my teenage days when I was being lectured for some boomer act of rebellion or other have I sat so cross-armed and clench-jawed in front of the TV. As if it weren't punishment enough that I was being forced to watch O'Reilly, it turns out he had Michelle Malkin on as his guest.

The minute she said the words, "DEMOCRAT PARTY," I wanted to claw her eyes out.

O'Reilly was in a typical revved-up rant, this time about the Yearly Kos conference. Nazi troop-hating rage-peddling hate extremists, yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah.

Since Dad was asleep in his chair, I mentioned to my step-mom that the Daily Kos website gets something like half a million hits a day and posts a hundred "Diaries," from anyone who wants to, and that O'Reilly and his crack team of researchers must have spent weeks ferreting out and cherry-picking the half-dozen or so loonies he cited with such outrage.

And that's when I had one of those moments Gloria Steinem refers to as a CLICK moment.

It was something I had read somewhere, and if I could remember where I'd give you a handy link, but you're just gonna have to trust me on this--that the Republican party had sent out talking-points to all their little lapdogs like O'Reilly and Limbaugh that the Democratic presidential candidates were all going to Yearly Kos and so therefore, they needed to talk up what a hotbed of leftwing radicals all those people in Chicago were and therefore, the whole damn Democratic party was going to hell in a handbasket. Or something to that effect.

And I realized why O'Reilly and his thugs were so intent on demonizing the second annual conference of bloggers. There are several reasons.

For one thing, it is common knowledge that the Republican right wing, which has dominated talk-radio and talk-television so exclusively for the past twenty years with such noise and growing power…has not done the same thing on the Internet. Just as Democrats seemed to have been caught by surprise by the sudden loud power of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and watched, helplessly, as they erected the framework on all the days' issues and drove the dialogue in the mainstream media for years…so the Republicans have been caught napping where the Internet--and the growing grassroots base of the Democrats--is concerned.

This is crucial, because recent polls reveal that many more young people seem to lean toward the Democratic party than toward the Republicans, and the Internet is home to young people.

And that was my second CLICK. The Republican party base, which has so faithfully delivered elections for them for the past twelve years…is aging.

My white-haired, gentle step-mom can do e-mail, but that's about it. She's afraid to venture very far into the Internet because she's scared she might somehow mess up Dad's computer. Neither one of them really does very much with the computer but check e-mails, and even then, they never open attachments of any kind.

For instance, she was worried about a grandchild who is adventuring in South America on an Internship, and so to ease her mind, I took the young lady's e-mail descriptions and Googled the spots she said she'd been, showing my dazzled step-mom what a wonderful trip her granddaughter was having. She would never have done that on her own.

What that tells me is that the messy, restless, opinionated, hard-headed Democratic party base skews young. They have built this massive grassroots through their own questioning minds and demand for fact and truth. Those of us who may not be exactly young ourselves have embraced this new medium because we have the same kinds of minds, and it has stimulated and energized our party and the national debate.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence, either. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a recent poll from the Washington firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner "suggests voters ages 18-29 have undergone a striking political evolution in recent years."

It gets worse for the GOP:

Young Americans have become so profoundly alienated from Republican ideals on issues including the war in Iraq, global warming, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration that the defections suggest a political setback that could haunt Republicans "for many generations to come," the poll said.

The startling collapse of GOP support among young voters is reflected in the poll's findings that show two-thirds of young voters surveyes believe Democrats do a better job than Republicans of representing their views--even on issues Republicans once owned, such as terrorism and taxes.

You should read the article. It's an eye-opener--in a good way.

But the kinds of people who devote themselves to talk radio or TV are not only more rigid in their thinking, I believe, but are also much less well-informed. And, like my beloved parents, they are growing older. It's a lot easier to get an energetic young person out signing petitions, making phone calls, and marching door-to-door than someone set in their ways who would rather sit on the couch in the dark and listen to Rush.

I'm not taking anything away from the legions of O'Reillyites, for example, who got JetBlue pulled from the Kos gathering by sending e-mails to the company. What I'm saying is that for a long time, it was those individuals who were mesmerized and mobilized by talk radio and TV, who set the agenda for all the rest of us, but they are not going to be around forever. We've got a ballooning mass of activists now to not only match them step by step, but make a difference, finally, on the other side of the debate.

And they are going to be around for a long time.

Something else occurred to me. In the Age of Rove, daily talking-points went out from the top down, starting at the White House and making their way through Congress, FOX news, and the talk shows. Pundits and pontificators recited by rote their robotic slogans, and because there was little opposition--especially in the lead-up to war--the mainstream media took up the chant until most of the country was hypnotized, for better or for worse, into doing what the White House or the Republican congress wanted.

The netroots, however, works from the bottom up. Citizen activists and citizen journalists rise up together, and together, lift up the issues that are important to them. Their sheer numbers and energy force those in power to respond, rather than having, say, a small cadre of a dozen or so middle-aged white men making all the decisions and forcing them downward on 300 million people.

The kinds of individuals who thrive on the Internet are not the same kinds of people who devote themselves to talk shows. They are much better informed, for one thing--most bloggers get their news from all kinds of online sources rather than one-sided talk shows or partisan networks. When my step-mom asked me which papers I read every day, she was dumbfounded when I reeled off half a dozen major dailies from all over the world.

Bloggers and online activists have restless, energetic minds. They have strong opinions and some of them can be as obnoxious as O'Reilly on his worst day, but the thing is, they are not just being fed controlled information. They are putting out information of their own, consuming information of all kinds, and demanding answers and solutions that don't fit neatly on a bumper sticker.

Bill and his ilk fear the Internet because they know their audiences don't fit that demographic, and that one day, no one will be listening to them anymore.

*cross-posted at: Link and at http://deaniemills.com