Let's Seize the Policy Narrative from the Pundits

I'd like to follow up on yesterday's post about how conservatives are attempting to stoke inter-generational strife in an attempt to hijack the debate over Social Security and Medicare and drive a wedge between young voters and the Democrats.

The more I think about it, the more it seems like a likely scenario that conservatives will adopt this tactic to erode Democratic gains among young voters. There's a lot of reasons for this:

1. As I noted yesterday, the electoral math is changing. Millennials are very progressive and there will only be more of them in the electorate in coming years. The entirety of the Millennial generation won't be eligible to vote until around 2014-2016 (depending on where you put the final birth-year). Without making more inroads, Republicans potentially face even larger losses in upcoming elections.
2. They've tried this tactic in the past in an effort to reach out to youth, notably with the work of Americans for Generational Equality during the formative years of Gen X - a generation that tended to be more economically and politically conservative. AGE revived itself recently and is already working on this.
3. Social Security in particular is an area where conservatives have the most traction with Millennials. Today, young people are worried about the economy and their fiscal prospects. There is room for conservatives to exploit those concerns.
4. We've already seen a little bit of this from McCain, who has railed against Social Security to youth voters, and who has specifically framed his comments about America's youth in terms of victimization (at the hands of liberal policies).

On November 5th, conservatives are going to need to make major inroads with America's youth if they are going to survive as anything more than a regional party of xenophobes. Barring a massive uprising by young evangelicals who hold more progressive views on the environment and social justice issues, this is going to be their only viable line of attack that could actualy gain them votes (the alternative is to declare Obama's election illegitimate because it is based on voter fraud, and a surge of "uninformed, unintelligent" young voters who didn't know what they were doing).

So what can we do? I say we play offense. Not on November 5th, but now. If young people are as determinative a factor in electing Obama as we all know and hope they can be, then we are going to be a hot commodity on November 5th. The big question will be - young people elected a President for the first time ever. Now What?

We should all be ready to go with an answer to that question right now. Jessy Tolkan and Billy Parish should be writing and pitching an op-ed about green jobs and climate change. Caitlin Howarth and Nate Loewentheil of the Roosevelt Institution should be writing op-eds about social security and health care. Anya Kamenetz should be writing about the economy; the Student PIRGs and Project on Student Debt should be writing about higher education reform; GOTV and civic groups like YDA, Mobilize.org, and us here at Future Majority should be writing about service learning and election reforms to permanently increase youth participation; state-based groups should be writing about local issues; and Campus Progress-funded newspapers should be writing about the challenges facing the next President and Congress.

These op-eds should all be framed in a way that defuses a narrative of inter-generational strife, demonstrates the intellectual bona-fides of our young leaders, and emphasizes just what Obama has said all along: that we need to work together to solve the challenges our nation now faces, not pit one generation against another. These op-eds should all outline a problem, what needs to be done, and how we can all work together to solve it.

Most importantly, we should be pitching these op-eds now, to national and state publications. Let these editors and publications know that should the youth vote surge, and elect President Obama, that on November 5th, they can be ready to run with an op-ed that outlines some aspect of the youth agenda. We should aim to have these published everywhere from the New York Times down to the local campus publication. We should flood the zone beginning on November 5th and put our frame into the media narrative before the Right does.

I'm tired of playing defense and reacting to bad media all the time. Let's play some offense.