Alan Simpson goes 'Gangnam style'

Former Sen. Alan Simpson has come up with a new way to get his message out about the fiscal cliff — he dances to Gangnam Style in a video.

In the new video for “The Can Kicks Back,” the 81-year-old former Wyoming Republican senator tells millennials: “Stop Instagramming your breakfast and tweeting your first world problems, and getting on YouTube so you can see Gangnam Style, and start using those precious social media skills to go out and sign people up on this baby.”


Simpson then does his best “horse” dance as he imitates the South Korean performer PSY, whose Gangnam Style video has been viewed more than 850 million times on YouTube.

What’s the story behind the video?

”We pulled up the YouTube video on our laptop and the three of us started practicing for a little bit,” TCKB field director Nick Troiano, 23, told POLITICO. “He related it to growing up in Wyoming and riding horses.”

Troiano and TCKB executive director Ryan Schoenike, 30, filmed the video last Wednesday in their D.C. office after Simpson accepted their invitation to help with their cause. Simpson took a dance break between a breakfast with The Christian Science Monitor and Capitol Hill meetings.

“Little did all of those important people know what he did in between,” Schoenike told POLITICO. “He’s got a great sense of humor. We weren’t sure if was going to do it. It’s great because no one is really communicating to our generation right now about this issue and that’s the goal with this campaign.”

Added Troiano: “We think the national debt is the greatest challenge facing our generation. And we realized that we need to break through to young people somehow because the debt isn’t the sexiest issue that is out there.”

TCKB is a nonpartisan campaign targeting millennials to fix the national debt, according to the campaign’s website.

Troiano and Schoenike said they’ve also reached out to Erskine Bowles, but declined to offer whether a future video is in the works. TCKB receives some of its funding from Simpson and Bowles-backed The Campaign to Fix the Debt, which aims to urge the government to make tough choices about the national debt. Simpson and Bowles are authors of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which has become a political hot topic amid for lawmakers looking to lower the debt.