Five Youth Vote Stories

I'm trying to finish up two stories I've been "working on" for about a month now - one on the seeming rebirth of MTV as a politically relevant entity, and another on pending lawsuits against the student canvassing industry. In the meantime, here are 5 stories worth some attention:

• A Voter Walks Into a Bar . . . The LA Times reports on efforts by Obama, McCain and Hillary to woo young professionals through "friendraisers" at bars and other cultural hot spots.
• Who's Rocking the Youth Vote for 2008 In this terrible article CBS manages to get a number of points wrong and violate quite a few of the 11 Rules for covering the youth vote. Also, apparently Gideon Yago is a youth vote expert because he works at MTV . . . It's been called to my attention that Gideon Yago does have some chops here, so he's got my apologies. In any case, he wasn't really the target of my ire, rather CBS was, for seemingly failing to talk to anyone (researchers, activists and advocates) who is working in the trenches on this issue.
• Which New Voters Will Actually Show Up? Over at Huffington Post, Chris Weigant notes that Hillary, Obama, and Edwards are all banking on bringing new faces to the caucus - single women, youth, and the poor, respectively. Weigant thinks these are all losing propositions, but whoever loses the least will emerge the winner. Or something like that . . .
• Clinton is taking no chances on this issue, as the Des Moines Register notes in Clinton Broadening Attacks on Obama. The Senator from New York continues to deploy the language of those who would disenfranchise youth by insinuating that many students do not have the right to caucus in Iowa. When I asked the campaign about this, I was provided with the following statement:
  

  Senator Clinton has been working hard to engage the youth vote across the country and in Iowa. She hopes that all Iowa students who have made Iowa their permanent home participate in the caucus.

  Nice, but the only problem is that the Iowa Secretary of State's office explicitly states that the students have a right to caucus, and if we're going to start drawing lines around what defines a "permanent resident" a lot of older folks who vacation down south in the winter need to stop polluting the Iowa Caucus with their out-of-state carpetbagging. Is this really the kind of democracy Clinton thinks we should be advocating?

• Again, we're going international. Students Defeat Chavez's Reforms. Students down in Venezuela were in large part responsible for Chavez's defeat this week:
  

  After facing an unusually strong protest movement on the streets of Venezuela's major cities — led not by traditional opposition figures but by university students who'd grown fearful that Chavez was moving the country toward a Cuba-style dictatorship — his reforms were narrowly beaten back by a 51% to 49% margin. The result, and Chavez's graceful acceptance of it, may well have set not only Venezuela, a key U.S. oil supplier, but all of Latin America on a far surer path to democracy in the 21st century.