SFBO

Promoted by Kevin

(This is an article that I wrote for the Cal Berkeley Democrats magazine Smart Ass shortly before the Inauguration, and finally got around to posting online...)

Barack Obama’s historic victory on November 4, 2008, was a watershed moment for the youth progressive movement. Twenty-three million Americans under the age of 30 went to the polls this fall and voted for Obama by a 2-1 margin, the largest partisan margin in American history. In California, the results were even more impressive, as Obama carried 80% of the 18-24 year old vote in California compared to McCain’s 18%.

But even as we bask in the glory of our recent accomplishments, the question on everyone’s mind is: what’s next? Where do go from here? Will young people stay involved post-election? To answer these questions, we must begin by looking back on how we got here.

Many in the media have told a narrative that Barack Obama mobilized the youth vote, which had failed to turnout in 2004. That’s simply not true. As Michael Connery wrote in his seminal book Youth to Power, “After the 2000 election, civic participation among young people began to rise, and in 2004, young voter turnout at the polls jumped for the first time in over a decade. This rise in civic participation continued during the 2005 and 2006 elections, proving not to be a historical blip, but the start of a trend of increasing political involvement by American youth.”

It was during the lead up to the 2004 election that a whole host of new progressive youth organizations sprang up and harnessed the dissatisfaction young people were feeling about the direction of the country. The Roosevelt Institution became the nation’s first student run think tank. The League of Young voters was formed to reach beyond the low hanging fruit of college students and organize youth in low-income communities and communities of color. The Center for Progressive Leadership, Young People For, and many other groups began training the next generation of young progressive leaders.

The tremendous youth support that Obama received was as much a product of the youth movement as the movement was a product of him. This is important to understand because Obama was only one side of the coin, and as he leaves for Washington, the infrastructure that existed long before him will remain in place.

What will change however is the focus of the movement. For the last eight years, young progressives have been united by a desire to unseat conservatives from power. Now that we finally have our turn behind the wheel, our activism will shift from campaigning to policy and advocacy. The movement may splinter to some degree as different organizations focus on different issues, but the engagement will continue because we are far from solving the many challenges that face us as a nation.

In California, we have no shortage of big projects to work on. Regardless of the outcome of the California Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on Prop 8, the losing side will put this issue back on the ballot, and young people will need to ready for another fight for marriage equality. We will also have hotly contested races for Governor, Senate, Attorney General, and other statewide offices in 2010. Not to mention, the 2/3rds rule in the legislature that has caused gridlock on passing state budgets for decades.

While many in the mainstream media spent the weeks following the election pontificating about whether or not youth engagement would sustain, those of us doing youth organizing had no doubt that our peers would stay involved. Would a budding new composer suddenly end her musical career after her first successful masterpiece? Of course not. Success is an incredible motivator, and although the purpose of our activism may become less clearly defined for a time, the enthusiasm that was sparked in this election will continue.

Craig is taking the weekend off. Here's some Quick Hits for today, and I'll have a post up tomorrow. --Mike

• USA Today reports that young adults health is either static or declining.
• Earlier this week, Sarah blogged about Meghan McCain and the GOP's (lack of) internet strategy. Jason Linkins at Huffington Post picked up the story as well, and he's not buying what Ms. McCain is trying to sell.
• At The Nation, Peter Rothberg previews Power Shift '09.
• It's Getting Hot in Here grades the green energy provisions in the recently passed stimulus package.
• Still trying to make heads or tails of the credit crisis? Check out this amazing video.
• At HuffPo, Jason Pollock (The Youngest Candidate) explains the importance of Shepard Fairey.
• Listen to network information economy guru Yochai Benkler talk about social production in this podcast.
• A new blog is tracking the Young Democrats Presidential election.
• As part of his campaign, YDA Presidential Candidate Chris Anderson has launched Your YDA, a site designed to elicit comments about all aspects of YDA's operations.
• Future Majority friend and Students for Barack Obama cofounder Tobin Van Ostern is making YouTube videos about the campaign. Check out the first one here:

Update: I'm trying to find out more about O'Malley Dillon. Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder has more on the new DNC team and how they might work with OFA 2.0. He paints a sunnier picture than I did, which is encouraging, but his reporting is more general and not at all youth-specific. Notably, Ambinder suggests that the 50 State program will not only continue, but will actually expand.
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The Washington Post reports that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine will replace Howard Dean as the head of the Democratic National Committee. Kaine will serve in a part-time capacity until 2010 as he finishes his term as governor. Jennifer O'Malley Dillon will be named the Executive Director of the DNC and handle day-to-to day operations.

So what does this mean for youth within the DNC and any hope of seeing a coherent, long-term youth strategy emerge from the party? It's unclear at this point.

A friend involved with the Young Democrats tells me that this could be good for youth organizers. YDA ran a strong program in Virginia in 2005, and Kaine was very supportive of their efforts on his behalf. And in 2006, young voters in the state played a crucial role in the election of Sen. Jim Webb. All that, along with his early support of Obama's youth-driven campaign, gives hope that Kaine "gets it" and will support efforts to increase young people's participation in the party infrastructure and as a key target in their strategies.

Yet at the same time, Kaine is only going to be on board part time and I haven't heard anything either way about Dillon. She worked for Edwards in Iowa, where he garnered very little of the youth vote, despite efforts by the campaign to court young voters through it's One Corps service program. But she also switched over to the Obama campaign during the general election. Who knows where that leaves her when it comes to increasing youth participation within the party.

I'm also discouraged by a simple fact that a colleague reminded me of this morning. Every Democratic Chairman in the last 16 years who served under a Democratic President has left the party in a weaker position than he found it. Generally this is because the party is subservient to the needs of the President during the time he is in office. During a Presidential term, the party in power focuses on helping their President achieve short-term goals instead of focusing on long-term infrastructure building. The two counter examples are Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, both of whom were independent of a Democratic President and left a drastically improved party in their wake.

Not to be a pessimist, but history seems doomed to repeat itself. Obama For America 2.0 looks like it will remain an independent entity, separate from the DNC. This of course is in the name of "post partisanship." The Obama folks don't want to scare off any supporters who may not want to be associated with the Democratic Party, so they are going to operate outside the party. That might be smart politics in the near-term, but if it means that the DNC is neglected, or an after-thought, that's also a recipe for an atrophied Democratic Party, potentially undoing the work of the past eight years.

This seems particularly true of the young people supporting Obama. We're already stuck in the less than ideal position of having YDA and CDA competing for the Democratic youth brand. With separate structures, one inside the party and one outside, one heavily funded and one drastically underfunded, and no real coordination between the two, Democratic Party youth organizing isn't as strong or as unified as it should/could be. Now add into the mix an extremely popular Students for Barack Obama 2.0 organization. It's got more credibility than YDA and CDA among students, but it doesn't necessarily build party loyalty or help anyone other than Obama. It will compete with YDA and CDA for money and bodies, potentially siphoning off valuable resources, yet even if it out-organizes YDA and CDA in the short-term, there is no guarantee that it will outlast either organization. SFBO is tied directly to the Obama brand. Once he is out of office, the organization loses it's core mission - supporting Obama. The potential is there to build a stellar organization that disappears at the end of the Obama administration, leaving nothing in its wake.

Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist here. I hope so. Time will tell. The DNC Winter Meeting is on January 21st in DC. I'm attending as a member of the youth council. It's my first DNC meeting, so it should be interesting. I'm doubtful, but maybe we'll get some light shed on these questions.

Great, great story on young voters and Students for Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal. This may be the first piece I've seen that really picks up on what peer to peer organizing, applied at the local level, is all about:

Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidency could rest on the votes of 20-to-30-year-olds -- and, to an unprecedented degree, he is letting his young supporters decide how to win those votes.
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At the University of Detroit Mercy, Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old superdelegate, set out cautiously with her clipboard to hit the bars to register Democrats to vote. Wayne County, which houses the university, has more than 1,400 businesses licensed to sell alcohol.

"We were shocked by the amount of people that really responded," says Ms. Wolfe. "We had one guy who had just moved from New York and knew that his vote in New York didn't mean as much as it did in Michigan. He was like, 'I'm so glad that you guys are here because I probably never would have actually switched my registration.'"

In Oregon, music and arts-based approaches have been more effective. At one Oregon university, students set up a party tent with an artist who painted murals of Sen. Obama. Whoever registered to vote at the tent was invited to sign the mural. The setup drew more students and eventually local musicians who would perform and attract more young voters, says Ms. Arsenault.

"In this campaign they gave students the ability to actually recognize what was needed," says Molly Kawahata, an 18-year-old convention delegate from California and an incoming freshman at University of California, Berkeley.
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In part, the local-autonomy approach emerged from lessons learned during the primary season. Student organizers at Boston College, for instance, gathered students to canvass community colleges in nearby Berlin and Manchester, N.H., says Joshua Darr, the 21-year-old Massachusetts director of Students for Barack Obama.

"The Obama campaign has really trusted students to organize their own campuses and that's very encouraging," says Mr. Darr.

Hell yeah - providing the resources to let young people organize how they know best in their communities. As long as you add in tracking and accountability, this is the way that youth organizing should work. All Democratic campaigns, and all Democratic state and local parties, should have similar organizing strategies for youth. As should outside organizations that work in support of the party and its candidates. This shouldn't just be the work of one campaign.

On a related note, I was able to sit down with Leigh Arsenault at the Democratic Convention and was super happy with what she had to say about how they will be organizing on campuses (above), the number of organizers they are hiring, and how they'll be working off campus to reach non-college youth, and making targeted ad buys aimed at youth. I'm not a huge fan of media buys if it comes at the expense of field, but that doesn't seem like it is at all happening, and I'm very curious to see if someone can produce some real research as to what targeted ads on Comedy Central, MTV and/or Cartoon Network might produce.

Good stuff all around. More on the Obama youth plan once I have another chance to touch base with the campaign.