President Barack Obama on "The Tonight Show" (AP Photo)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (kids: a long time ago people listened to music on things called records and sometimes they got scratched and skipped and played the same little section of a song over and over and over and…oh never mind) Republicans just don’t get it.

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s “Tonight Show” appearance is so incredibly telling — and sad if you were hoping for a reasonably adept opposition to push back on Barack occasionally. The usual suspects and brothers in arms — The New York Post and Fox News — were agog that the President “yuks it up on Leno as economy burns.”

The Post‘s am-I-a-journalist-or-an-opinionist? Charles Hurt penned a scathing column noting that while the “economy lies in ruin” Obama has “with great fanfare filled out his March Madness basketball bracket before flying off to California to parry and jest with Jay Leno….”

The conservative media was actually just riffing on a theme Republican Senators introduced Thursday during a news conference ostensibly held to discuss the AIG bonus boondoggle. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl set the tone:

He flies off to Los Angeles to be on the Jay Leno show. My suggestion is that he come back — since he’s taken the full responsibility — to get his people together and say ‘I want to know exactly what happened, who did what when and how are we going to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and how can we manage these taxpayer assets in a way to solve the banking and financial institution crisis.’

Putting aside all the times when Democrats were up-in-arms about President Bush doing things like staying on vacation in Texas for days after Katrina hit New Orleans while Republicans defended him there’s a real issue here that we’ve talked about here several times before. The electorate is not what Republicans seem to think it is.

For decades Democrats have sought the support of young voters hoping that this group could be motivated to vote in numbers similar to those of their parents. But it never happens. Sure younger voters have increasingly sided with Dems since the late 80s but the percentage of people over 45 who vote is much higher than the percentage of those under 30 who vote. That hasn’t changed much in 30 years.

What has changed is that those younger voters have become older voters and the Democrats finally cashed in on that demographic truth in the last two elections. In general polling has shown people do tend to become more conservative as they age but not necessarily more Republican. Instead they tend to become more conservative within the party of their youth.

The other change is in the way people in various age groups get their news. Pew does great research about this and in the latest poll released at the end of last year, found that people under 30 now depend on the internet as much as television for their information. And the trend lines heavily favor the internet in the future.

More telling is what kind of television shows these voters get their news from. In another Pew poll released in January 2008, the trend towards people under 30 getting at least some of their campaign news from shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, coupled with that group’s high use of the internet to watch video clips speaks volumes about how a growing number of Americans gain an understanding of what’s going on.

When Obama’s people talk about wanting to “speak directly to Americans” or when Bush talked about going around “the filter” of the mainstream media, both are simply recognizing the truth: All the self-importance of the cable news channels and network anchors is delusional. Even the highly-rated prime-time cable shows (Olbermann, O’Reilly) get a smaller audience of people under 54 years old (a demographic threshold for advertisers and a majority of voters) than the lowest-rated shows on the lowest-rated CW network.

The fact is, reaching the people who will vote in the next election means speaking to them where they are: On the internet, on social-networking sites (Facebook isn’t for college students anymore — Al D’Amato recently friended me!), on You Tube, on late-night comedy shows, on daytime talk shows, on just about anything other than news shows.

So while Republicans and their media supplicants bellyache about Obama’s apparent major miscue of going on Leno, voters don’t really see what all the fuss is about. After all many Americans now get a better understanding of the critical issues facing America from the first 8 minutes of John Stewart than they do from 30 minutes of Couric or Gibson or 60 minutes of Maddow or Hannity or Cooper.