John McCain

This new ad is being broadcast today on radio stations asking citizens to call Senator McCain to express their discontent with the new anti-immigrant law and to urge McCain to oppose SB1070. The ad features Arizona students celebrating Cinco de Mayo but are suddenly mistaken for illegal immigrants for celebrating the holiday, drinking Mexican beer, and listening to Mexican music.

Americans for America PAC is responsible for the advertising and is working to do rapid response on issues like this new anti-immigrant law.

How does one know when a politician isn't up with the times? I suspect there are a number of devices that get to this metric, but one might be looking for someone harping about the nation being "center-right."

John McCain, of 2008 "Country First" fame, appeared with Sarah Palin yesterday to speak to a crowd of Tea Partiers. While Palin continued to gloss over the constant references to violent acts in her exhortations to teabaggers over the past couple days, McCain railed against health insurance reform, vowing a repeal of the newly-passed law.

When McCain spoke, he responded to President Obama's speech yesterday, in which Obama defied Republicans to campaign on a platform of repealing the health care reform law, in light of the various benefits included within it. "And my attitude is, 'Go for it,'" Obama said.

McCain declared: "We're gonna 'go for it,' an we're gonna repeal this bill. We're gonna stop this spending."

McCain also said: "Our answer is, yes, we're gonna 'go for it,' and we're gonna get it, and we're gonna restore the government back to the people of this country, because this is a right-of-center nation, and this president is governing from the left, and it will not stand."

When I finish reading that, the question that immediately pops into my head is... "What happens if it does stand?" What happens if people like this health insurance reform, given that a majority of Americans had already liked the bill's individual previsions or believed they weren't liberal enough? What happens if the world does not end? More broadly, what happens when the entirety of the nation's most diverse generation ever comes of age and is largely politically active, expressing its left-leaning viewpoints?

I think this all comes back to many members of the GOP and the conservative fringe being unable to zoom out and view these events over the long-term. We saw this with McCain himself in his poorly-run campaign in 2008 -- the difference between tactics and strategy. Yes, Obama faced some trouble with the Rev. Wright controversy, but he gave a forward-looking and eloquent speech that muted much of the criticism. Yes, the McCain campaign was enjoying success in its portrayal of Obama as a celebrity political novice that summer, but because it wasn't rooted in anything, the McCain camp apparently didn't think anything of choosing a mayor with frighteningly little experience as their vice presidential nominee. Yes, health insurance reform has had its troubles, and while the GOP was responsible for many of those Democratic struggles, their refusal to do anything other than saying no left them without any input whatsoever. And now, there's this call for repeal, a move to take away all the benefits given to 32 million people. A conscious choice to choose the student loan industry over young Americans.

As the GOP leans more to the right, its rhetoric closer and closer to a boiling point, it will increasingly place itself in untenable political positions. The GOP chooses to live in the moment, ignoring the political realities around the corner. Contrary to John McCain's wishes/statements, this is no longer a center-right nation. As the Millennials come of age politically, their size and pro-government/socially liberal positions will tip the country to the left, a la the 1930s.

So, again John -- what happens if it does stand? What's the contingency plan?

When I think of the way that campaigns and politicians reached out to young voters this year, I have to say that the GOP doesn't come to mind as the model group of youth friendly politicos.  

Republicans also haven't been the most friendly when it comes to supporting policies that impact young people.  In 2007 when the House worked to take millions from subsidies that went to providers of student loans and instead gave them as a supplement to increase Pell Grants,  the President threatened to veto it.  

In 2005 when there was a push to increase funding to Pell Grants in a stimulus package and Sen. Arlen Spector (R-PA) said he

"opposes the proposed increase in funding for Pell Grants for College students because it would do little to spur short term economic growth." CollegeConfidential says.

There were 149 no votes in the House on the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007.  Minority Leader John Boehner said he opposed the bill because

"While Democrats insist on burdening taxpayers with new spending and higher taxes, House Republicans have presented plans to balance the budget without raising taxes, keep federal spending in check, and let middle-class families keep more of their own money."

"Plans to balance the budget" is the funny part of that... well... the whole thing is kinda a joke.

Finally, President Bush and many Republican members (along with Democrats) pushed for an $800 billion bailout to financial institutions before the election in November to stop the hemorrhage caused by, among other things, some pretty irresponsible lending practices.

The current stimulus package gives money not to the banks but directly to the people and again gives more money to Pell Grants not to mention money for better equipment in schools, and expanding broadband across the country so rural America can finally have better access to information.  

Yet John McCain, in a sudden decision to begin advocating for young people, has described this as "generational theft."

So giving money to the banks is ok - but giving money to people is theft?  

McCain claims

"We are robbing future generations of Americans of their hard-earned dollars because we are laying on them a debt of incredible proportions."

What was his excuse before?  I mean, John McCain quit his Presidential campaign to work on the Banking Bailout .... Where was the fiscal restrain then?  Where was this fiscal restraint 8 years ago when Republicans signed a blank check to President Bush for unfunded tax cuts and approved year after year of borrow and spend policies?

Last year during the election I followed US Senate candidate Jim Slattery around on a campus tour he made across Kansas.  Slattery pushed a similar higher education plan to then candidate Obama saying that students needed a $5,000 college tuition tax cut.  Slattery said young people are owed things like this because under Republican rule they have cut taxes while overspending to such an extent that it amounts to "intergenerational robbery."

When Slattery described it - I understood... it made perfect sense.  President Bush and the Republican House and Senate in 2001 inherited a budget surplus that they then turned into the worst deficit in American history.  Because of Republican spending and irresponsible Republican tax cuts our government is so underfunded and services are so scarce that we now face an economic recession unrivaled since the Great Depression.  We have zero global competitiveness, our students remain undereducated compared to our global counterparts, and only now are Republicans saying - we should exorcise restraint when Americans need it most?

The income disparity is the worst that its been in over 100 years and Republicans like John McCain actually want to claim that giving money directly to the people who need it most is theft?  A Bank Bailout was ok... but a People's Bailout is wrong?

To me this just seems like another blaring examples of how Republicans claim to love America but clearly can't stand supporting Americans.  Rather than work in a bi-partisan way and be grown-ups about the whole thing, as Paul Begala says its more "Republican strategy of deny, delay, and do nothing."

Luckily young voters don't buy it.  National polls overwhelmingly support for the President's stimulus package with and without changes, and many state reports even in red-state-America like Utah have young voters behind the package and supporting the President.   

This leaves me to wonder if the GOP is only pretending to use the concept of future generations because its politically expedient for them to do so, or if there is a real genuine need to reach out to youth and they're just bungling it so miserably.  Either way, this stimulus goes to people who need it - not corporations or the wealthy 2%... this is the change we voted for.

Hat tip to Matt Singer of Forward Montana for calling my attention to this bit of ridiculousness by John McCain (emphasis mine):

Sen. John McCain is urging his supporters to sign a petition opposing the economic stimulus bill, saying in an e-mail from his "Country First" PAC that the plan "is big on giveaways for the special interests and corporate high rollers, yet short on help for ordinary working Americans."

"I cannot and do not support the package on the table from the Democrats and the Obama Administration," McCain writes. "Our country does not need just another spending bill, particularly not one that will load future generations with the burden of massive debt."

Note to John McCain - you do not speak for the youth of this country. I think the electoral results from the election provide definitive evidence of that:

You had over a year to make your case to America's youth, and they rejected your candidacy, and your ideas for our country, by record margins. Even in your own state of Arizona, young people voted for change and declared President Obama to be the standard bearer of that change. kthxbai.

(It should also be noted that in October of 2008 I made the case that Republicans would use debt and entitlement reform as the basis for their appeal to young voters. Looks like Sen. McCain is drawing from that playbook. Fortunatley, this is not a tactic that is likely to hold water with young voters, even if it does gain traction in the media. Young people are more open to talking about reforming entitlements, but when the options are fully explained to them, they are far from natural conservatives on the issue.)

Since August, when I started writing here, I have regularly commented on the lack of technological proficiency exhibited by the McCain campaign. Apparently, the technological bungling hasn't stopped.

Sarah Lai Stirland's October piece in Wired magazine, describing how the Obama campaign leveraged its technological advantage, also highlighted the technological ineptness of the McCain campaign.

Like Obama, the RNC and the McCain campaign offer supporters their own set of social networking tools. But volunteers in Florida say they generally don't use the sites. Harout Samra, chairman of the Florida College Republicans, notes that McCain launched his services — McCainSpace and McCain Nation — relatively late in the campaign, and Samra and his fellow organizers had already gotten used to relying on Facebook and Storm, the College Republicans' social networking tool.

"Some of it is just repetitive, without adding much value," says Samra, a 25-year-old University of Miami law student. "I really don't have time to learn how to use something new."

Even McCain supporters readily acknowledge Obama's superior online organizing.

"I will just say that they've done a great job reaching out to young people," says 20-year-old Justin York, Central Florida chairman of Students for McCain. "I do have a lot of respect for whoever cooked up their operation, because it's an impressive machine that they have built among young people.... We don't have anything nearly as advanced as the Obama campaign."

It's a sentiment expressed by McCain supporters in other demographics.

"I'm afraid we're not that sophisticated," says Judy Wise, a retiree in Plant City. Wise is a lifelong Republican who volunteers three full days of her week for the McCain campaign. She manages McCain's Plant City office, where volunteers use the RNC's Voter Vault for phone banks, but not for neighborhood canvasses.

"It would be nice to know who the undecideds are," she says. "You don't want to waste your time on those people who are already voting for McCain, or those who have already made their minds up on Barack Obama."

"We've probably called every Republican in Orange County at least twice," says the College Republicans' York. "Some people tell us politely that they've been called, but others shout: 'This is the third time I've been called, and if you call again, I'm going to change my vote!'"

And so we all know what happened on November 4th. On the shoulders of millions of online supporters and donors -- many of which were recruited and welcomed thanks to the Obama's extensive technological outreach -- Obama routed McCain to become the 44th President-elect of the United States of America. After the election, whether it was a matter of not knowing how to do it or sheer laziness, the information on campaign aides' Blackberries remained on the devices -- including the personal contact information of a plethora of reporters, political operatives, politicians, and others. And the Blackberries were sold in a firesale.

An enterprising DC television reporter named Tisha Thompson picked a couple up, and a story was born.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

(Given the success -- or lack thereof -- of the McCain campaign and incidents like this, anyone thinking of using these devices to see how grassroots operations really work might want to reevaluate that thought.)

“Somebody made a mistake,” one owner told us. “People’s numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased.”

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

We called the McCain-Palin campaign, who says, “it was an unfortunate staff error and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure.”

This story is a funny one, but getting serious for one second, it's a very good thing Barack Obama won. Apparently not only did McCain not understand technology, but his staff -- the people that likely would have gone to the White House with him -- apparently didn't have any technological appreciation or common sense either. It's just one more nugget to remind us to count our blessings and appreciate our competent campaign.

Pew Research has a new report: Young Voters in the 2008 Election. The details of the report read like they were ripped right from the blog posts here at Future Majority - I could get used to that.

If you are interested in demographic data on the 2008 youth vote, there's lots of good stuff in the report, including breakouts by income, education, race, religiosity, gender and party ID. The long and short being that, among 18 - 29 year olds, Obama won all racial, gender, and socioeconomic demographics, including white non-college males. The only group that he lost, according to the data, is self-identified young Republicans.

Beyond demographics, there were two findings in the research that I thought were noteworthy in that I hadn't seen them reported anywhere else. The first was this breakdown of the Democratic youth vote margin compared to the overall Democratic vote over the past three decades. We've touched on that data here (see the graphs on the sidebar), though we've never compared them side by side in this format. It really highlights how significant and unusual young voter's support for Obama is historically:

The second item I wanted to highlight, and to my mind the most interesting/new item in the data, is the vast difference in contact rates by the campaigns.

Nationally, 25% of young voters reported being contacted at some point by the Obama campaign, compared to just 13% for John McCain. In crucial swing states, that gap climbed as high as 35%. Back in 2007 and early 2008, I was worried that "maverick" John McCain, ubiquitous guest on the Daily Show, spotted in such movies as Wedding Crashers; a candidate who did quite well in his appearance at the MTV/MySpace Dialogue, would make a play for the youth vote. Maybe it was a function of the youth energy surrounding Obama's campaign by the time McCain emerged from the primaries. Maybe it was a function of McCain's smaller campaign budget and lack of a coherent field operation. But it looks like the Maverick completely ceded the playing field to Sen. Obama when it came to young voters. He didn't even try.

Looking at the contact rates for older cohorts, it looks like McCain had his hands full just trying to compete with Obama among his base - voters over 65 who were the only age demographic to choose him over Sen. Obama.

Pew notes that this disparity in contact rate accounted for a significant difference at the polls, and hits upon one of our favorite talking points here at Future Majority (emphasis mine):

But the electoral influence of young voters also depends on efforts made to mobilize them. According to the exit polls, young voters in key battleground states this year were far more likely to have been contacted by the Obama campaign than by the McCain campaign - and in some states they were more likely than older voters to have been contacted, a significant reversal from past patterns.

Nationally, a quarter of voters (25%) 18-29 say someone contacted them in person or by phone on behalf of the Obama campaign about coming out to vote. By contrast, just 13% were contacted by the McCain campaign. In 2004, nearly the same share of young voters was reached by the Kerry campaign (22%) as was reached by the Bush campaign (19%).

But the disparity was much larger in some of the key battleground states. In Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Obama carried by double-digit margins, more than half of voters under age 30 said they were contacted by the Obama campaign (54% in Pennsylvania and 61% in Nevada). The McCain campaign reached considerably fewer young voters in those states -- 30% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Nevada. Obama's get-out-the-vote operation also reached three times as many young voters as McCain's operation in Indiana (45% vs. 15%) and twice as many in Florida (32% vs. 16%).

The curious thing about the data is that, despite incredibly high contact rates for young voters, major swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida actually saw a significant decline in share among young voters. In those three states - almost the holy trinity of Presidential Politics, youth share of the electorate dropped 4%, 4%, and 3% respectively over 2004 levels.

The most obvious reason I can think of behind this dramatic underperformance is disinterest and disillusionment among young McCain supporters. Lacking any significant contact or encouragement from their candidate - who spent his final weeks on the trail shoring up Red States - perhaps they turned out in far lower numbers than in the more closely contested 2004 race. If those young conservatives sat it out on election day, and older voters turned out in greater numbers than usual, that might account for the rather dramatic decrease in youth share in those states.

Whatever the cause - and I'm sure it is something we'll be returning to again and again in the coming months as more data creeps out - this is great information from PEW proving once again that outreach to young voters works. Not only can it move votes, it can win elections.

The Discovery Channel YouTube channel Why? Tell me Why? Addressed the question of why young voters vote the way they do and old voters vote the way they do.

Irwin Morris from the University of Maryland says these are tendencies that develop depending on the political environment. Young people have come of age in an era with unpopular Republicanism thus they are more inclined to harness those anti-republican sentiments and carry them with them throughout the course of their lives.

The same is/has been true for older voters who he said came of age in an era of anti-democratic tendencies which is why they lean more toward republicans. This might also account for the messages republicans used nearing election day about communism and socialism etc... because those were real threats that older voters faced when they were first beginning to cast ballots.

These kinds of arguments of course flopped on young voters who only know about socialism within the context of republican finger pointing and communism with regard to Cuban relations or history classes about the former Soviet Union.

With "reliable seniors" as a major voting demographic in the past, this was a good strategy, but as we saw with the new data, young voters surpassed those seniors in turnout and at least a third of the seniors voted for Obama.

My hope is that this means we are finally beyond the idea that crying "socialism" and "communist" are helpful to a campaign.

Some reading material when you have time to take a break from the craziness:

• Music for Democracy has launched its "Be the Change" project:
  

  Hip-hop stars Chingy, Q and MC Lyte have joined forces with two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter Graham Nash in an innovative get-out-the-vote effort that aims to mobilize young voters for election 2008 by leveraging the power of social networks. On November 4, music fans who sign up for "Be the Change" will receive an automated call from the musician of their choice to remind them to go to the polls. A selected number of voters will receive calls from the musicians themselves.

• A recap of why Election 2008 deserves the "historic" label, especially given the generational tensions.
• A commentary on why youth will show up at the polls this year.
• Attention political junkies: Google has created an elections map complete with results since 1980 for each state.
  
• Andy Kroll writes a couple (#1 and #2) posts on pushback on the Hip Hop Republicans and what they're doing to change the culture and approach the contemporary GOP has taken over the last decade or two.
• Want to watch the election results with some fellow liberals? Living Liberally lets you know where you can go.
• 35,000 Colorado mail-in votes from newly-registered voters could be nullified, thanks to confusion over the need to include an ID.
• Obama's not the only politician popular among young voters.
• A public-private partnership to fix our ever-mounting problems. A Green New Deal. Sounds pretty good, huh? Read more.
• Anna Quindlen at Newsweek has her own commentary on the potential of Millennial voters on Election Day

John McCain is preemptively kicking young people out of his events. Even the ones that support him:

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

I think this is the ultimate "get off my lawn" moment. The Republican Party literally eating its young. I hope this is a widespread phenomenon.

I am a young amateur filmmaker from Canada who, after becoming increasingly frustrated with the political system and lack of action among his peers has made a short video aimed at George W Bush, John McCain and the conservative/religious right. The result is a hilarious but deadly serious message of anger and a call for mobilization.

Watch, laugh, think, maybe die a little inside, and then spread the message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw88vPtMR40