strategy

I'm still decompressing from my wedding/honeymoon and getting my house (figurative and literal) in order. It will probably take me a couple days to fully get back in to the swing of things after two weeks off the grid. In the meantime, here' a Quick Hits(ish) post. Expect a lot of these for the next couple of days as I get back on my feet.

• Here's an interesting chart delineating the proper uses of twitter in a variety of business/activist settings. Colin Delaney of ePolitics also has some interesting things to say about the proper uses of Twitter.

• Erica Williams deftly explains the power of good messaging in a policy fight.
• At Mother Jones, Michael Silberman offers yet another look at how online tools helped put Obama over the top.
• 5 elements of a successful Facebook fan page.
• Front Line Leaders Academy, a project of PFAW and the Young Elected Officials Network, is accepting applications for their 2009 class.
• Secretary Clinton has announced plans for a second Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. The goals of the summit are to help youth use online tools to fight oppression, and win over hearts and minds around the world.
• CIRCLE has released a slide show of data about non-college youth:

• Open Left and Daily Kos' microgrants program is up and running. Go read the rules and submit your idea.
• For those looking for summer opportunities in politics, check out the New Organizing Institute's Summer Boot Camp.

In 2004, it was impossible to get the media to take young voters seriously. I can remember the frustration at MFA over the quality of the media coverage and the scarcity of stories about young voters. Sure The Nation and Alternet wrote a bunch of articles, and there was a minor wave of pieces about "Conservative Punks" (an astroturf movement that never materialized), but, for the most part, it was extremely difficult to get the mainstream political press to pay attention beyond publishing a few articles about how much money Rock the Vote was blowing on media buys.

Even after the election results came in, the "apathetic youth" meme kept on trucking, with most major media outlets and commentators pushing that same tired line. So its nice to see that the mainstream media is finally recognizing that A: young voters did turnout in record numbers in 2004, and B: that young voters could play a decisive roll in the upcoming midterm election.

More and more this is the story-line I'm reading, most recently at MSNBC and the Boston Globe. And more and more, the "apathetic youth" meme is relegated to B-level metro papers where the new conventional wisdom has yet to trickle down.

But to call this a new conventional wisdom is, I think, premature. Better to say that the narrative is in flux, and what happens in the next two months will decide how the media covers young voters in the 2008 Presidential cycle. This raises a couple of question: