Karl Rove

Yay on the students at Choate, who are calling on their headmaster to rescind his offer to Karl Rove to deliver the school's 2008 commencement address:

The News deeply objects to the appointment of Mr. Rove to speak this June. At Commencement two years ago on June 4, 2006, Headmaster Shanahan asked graduating seniors to think of their responsibilities to themselves, and to others. He lamented how “responsibility to others and for oneself has been all but forgotten in certain circles.” Mr. Shanahan alluded to various public figures who have been exposed for scandalous activities, noting that in spite of their lack of ethics and sense of responsibility they were all found to be “not guilty.” At that Commencement Mr. Shanahan posed a very important and pressing question: “How can so many moral, ethical and legal laws be broken and still no one is guilty, no one assumes public responsibility for having chosen to do wrong?”

It is ironic that the man who issued those words two years ago has chosen a commencement speaker who has gained infamy in many circles for less-than-ethical decisions and actions.Thus far, Mr. Rove has not been indicted for any major crimes. But, many would argue that he is as culpable for the compromised situation the country finds itself in as any other figure of the Bush administration.

This is becoming something of a pattern. Former Bush Administration officials aren't finding the lecture circuit to be as lucrative or welcoming as they'd hoped. Last month, the Washington Post reported that Alberto Gonzalez was having a hard time booking speaking gigs at colleges and universities, a situation that has put a crimp in his fundraising efforts to pay off his extensive legal bills.

Larry Lessig is well known as a brilliant legal mind and nerd extraordinaire, but his recently posted Ted Talks video showed me a side to him I was excited to see.

Larry has our backs.

After explaining to the older leaning Ted audience what a mashup or remix was and showing some of my favorite examples, Lessig explains to them

"In my view the most significant thing to recognize about what this internet is its opportunity to revive the "read/write" culture..... digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal cords ... user generated content spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these (shows logos of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc..). Celebrating amateur culture - by which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they are doing and not for the money.

I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time. For what (John Phillip) Sousa romanticized when seeing the young people circled together singing songs, its what your kids are doing right now. Taking the old songs and remixing them to make them something different. Its how they understand access to this culture."

He goes on to talk about these technologies not being new, these are things that film producers have been able to do for years but it is the democratization of this technique.

"Anyone with a $1500 computer who can take sounds and images from around us and use them to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. This is how they think. It is what your kids are. As they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationships to themselves." (emphasis added)

Lessig then goes on to explore the assault on creative culture with the "right vs. wrong" world of copywright laws, piracy, and the youth lead underground.

This lecture is particularly interesting given the NYTimes article about Ron Paul today about online (and also youth support) that people find so shocking. Here is a HUGE participatory campaign that has translated online action to blink and bank.

Contrasted - and on the same day - that the Clinton Campaign insults young people and Facebook users for not wearing 3 piece establishment suits and being old.

" At least two of Hillary Clinton's upper-echelon advisers, Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn, were decidedly unimpressed. "Our people look like caucus-goers," Grunwald said, "and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook." Penn added, "Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state."

I don't think I'm alone in my age group looking for jobs where I can wear sandals and t-shirts to work. Ten bucks says this is one of the major reasons that there is a massive anti-Hillary facebook group.

Not to mention Karl Rove and Max Cleland who spoke at a conferences on the Rise of Citizen 2.0.

"He (Rove) argued that the Netroots have been largely ineffective and said MoveOn.org’s inability to end the war proves his point."

"Cleland also lamented the abundance of vulgar words on blogs and expressed shock when a friend shared with him my favorite YouTube video. The blogosphere, he said, is "out of control" and "ain't gonna win undecided voters" even though it may be responsible for increases in youth voter turnout."

I'm sure there is a George Allen, Hillary Clinton, and Karl Rove walk into an internet cafe joke to be made here somewhere. Of course, she's only recently become youth friendly. Though only technically. Perhaps, she'll learn better soon.

I think the character of campaigns like Ron Paul, Howard Dean, Webb, Tester, and others compared to very establishment, message controlled, topdown campaign- web 2.0 (aka youthy stuff) might be a necessary quality. If you're an establishment candidate like Clinton and you've already declared yourself as the winner then there is no need for any kind of outside of the box thinking. I think John Kerry would disagree (though not until after November 2004). But if you're opposing these types of candidates you can't win unless you create a backdoor, under the radar, campaign... Just ask Nancy Boyda.

Those, most often, are fueled by the enthusiasm of youth and the young at heart who are utilizing the technologies that CNN posts each night.

I hate to tell Sen. Clinton or Karl Rove this... but this is the future, this is the generation of your children, and until you embrace it you'll continue to only pull votes from the older crowds which will grow older and older as you yourselves do until eventually your own support will appear in history books rather in the tracking polls you'd like to see it in.

This should be good.

And if you haven't heard yet, today is a joyful day.

You can't get a 35 year old to teach the Republican Party how to reach young people. You just can't rely on it. Young people have got to reach young people. --Karl Rove, 1972.

Truer words were never spoken. When Rove said that, he was working for Nixon and was in charge of GOP youth outreach. You can watch a video here (It's a trip - direct mail was being promoted as the savior of participatory democracy).

Despite what he told CBS's earnest newscaster, Rove's work for Nixon wasn't all voter registration and civic goodness. Karl Rove was already well-versed in shady tactics to disrupt the Democratic campaigns. When Rove says he's going to target youth, he knows how to do it. Positively by recruiting YAF, College Republicans, and Leadership Institute grads to rile up and empower his base, and negatively by suppressing and disrupting the work of his opponents.

Of course, he may be a bit out of touch lately.

In case you missed it, there have been some oversight hearings lately about improper partisan political activities on the part of our government. You can watch a video of Henry Waxman and other committee members grilling a clueless government official about these allegations here.

A happy outcome of these hearings is that the public now has access to some Republican strategy documents (pdf) related to the 2006 and 2008 elections, and it looks like Young Voters are going to be a priority for the GOP in 2008. Here's a slide from the presentation discussed in yesterday's committee hearing:

This doesn't surprise me at all. We already know that young voters were a decisive part of many Democratic victories in 2006. As was the Latino vote (which is also a young vote).

The presentation also noted that in 2006:

• 22 races were decided by 2 points or less
• 18 races were decided by fewer than 5,000 votes
• 6 races were won by fewer than 1,000 votes

Increased young voter turnout probably makes the difference in lot of those races. It's what makes the work of groups like the League of Young Voters - who reach out to youth that are normally passed over by traditional GOTV - all the more important, and makes me wonder even further about the strategic thinking behind recent funding decisions by the Democracy Alliance.

We know the GOP will be targeting us and our peers in 2008 (or at least looking to suppress our turnout). This is not the time for Democrats to take our vote for granted.