national security

While it should not surprise the most intense political observers, the Republican Party has lost the faith of young voters in yet another category.

A National Journal piece this weekend analyzes poll data from a Democracy Corps survey conducted from May 10-May 12.

The poll's central finding is that in the wake of President Obama's election, the traditional Republican advantage on national security issues has evaporated. Asked May 10-12 which party is better at handling "national security," 43 percent of respondents said Republican and 41 percent said Democratic -- a statistical tie.

That contrasts with the 14-point advantage (49 percent to 35 percent) that Republicans held last August in a Greenberg-Rosner poll, and the 29-point edge (54 percent to 25 percent) that they held six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, the latest survey indicates that Democrats now hold sizable leads over Republicans on several components of national security, such as diplomacy. Asked which party is superior at "improving global respect for America," respondents gave Democrats a whopping 36-point edge. On "working with our allies around the world," Democrats ended up with a 27-point margin.

The new Democracy Corps poll also found that Democrats hold advantages -- albeit slimmer ones -- on the questions of which party would do a better job with "the situation in Afghanistan" (12 percentage points) and "the situation in Iraq" (10 points).

While the GOP still has a decent foothold among youth with regard to national security issues, currently statistically tied with Democrats, their disadvantage is clear. Their huge momentum loss from 2003 to now has to be depressing in its own right, but on top of that, the Millennial worldview has changed. Millennial views of national security are steeped in multilateralism, with diplomacy at the forefront. And as indicated in the excerpt above, Democrats dominate similarly-focused survey categories.

This has to be encouraging news to the Truman Project, an organization that trains progressive youth to lead on matters of national security. On its website, the Truman Project notes that it has trained youth who have now gone on to positions of importance, such as military leaders, campaign advisers, and congressional staffers.

Thanks to its hard work, the Truman Project and other organizations targeting progressive youth have assisted in developing a generation of Millennial activists creating positive change. As a consequence, the Republican Party is contracting with no apparent clue of how to stop it.

A profound post by Matt Compton at Democratic Strategist questions whether the Presidential Records Act that Congress passed in 1978 is applicable in today's internet-based office environment.

Email had been invented seven years earlier in a project funded by the Department of Defense, but it's hard to imagine that the authors of the Presidential Records Act could have foreseen a government which put instant, electronic communication into widespread use. To ask anyone at the time to imagine the sprawling, interconnected world of the Internet as it is today would have been laughable.

And yet this 1978 law still dictates how the executive branch does business.

During the election, the Obama campaign was deeply immersed in the world of the Internet, and we've spent a lot of time talking about the brilliance of the external online strategy. But much less has been made of how well Obama for America as an organization used the Web internally.

Staffers used online tools to share documents, built wikis to train volunteers, used Facebook to build get to know each other. And throughout it all, the staff -- from David Axlerod on down -- maintained a continuous conversation through instant messenger.

It now looks, however, like that practice will be put to an end.

Citing both the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and security concerns, lawyers for the incoming administration have told staffers that they will not be able to use instant messenger in the White House. They will forgo the use of an official Facebook account as a tool to communicate with supporters. They won't be allowed to bring in USB drives to take work home. Access to many websites will be restricted. And in many cases, the computers at their desks will be dated and running old Windows software.

While cybersafety and national security are heavy issues in this debate, isn't a lack of creativity and transparency a threat as well? As we move into the 21st Century in an unenviable position, shouldn't we be doing everything we can to do things the best that we can? I don't think "the best" involves blocking websites and limiting the White House's access to outside sources and opinions. Certainly, we can't have a White House haphazardly wading into cyberspace, but, as Compton notes, the NSA and other agencies worked on his Blackberry to make it secure. We should be doing the same with the online presence in the White House.