THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Great piece on political activist Danny Goldberg, the record industry leader who discovered Nirvana - and who also happens to get the political scene in a way few others do (check out his blog here):

Some people are listening: Goldberg has been flogging his book all summer, jousting with Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert, doing panels and store appearances, and most recently condensing the book's thesis for the Nation. "Dispatches From the Culture Wars" is being read with interest by those in what turns out to be a vast academic and nonprofit community dedicated to researching young people's voting habits. Most of those experts disagree with Goldberg about the importance of Gore and Lieberman's stances on pop culture in the 2000 race -- few young people paid attention to that debate, they say.

But most of them do agree with Goldberg that the Democrats made a shameful showing, considering their platform is in line with most young people's beliefs about such issues as environmental protection, gay rights, affirmative action, gun control and the role of government. In 1992, Bill Clinton was credited with energizing young voters by appearing on the Arsenio Hall show and MTV (where he would return in 1996 to answer the infamous "boxers or briefs" question), and of the demographic groups that voted him into office, Clinton did best with voters under 30.

But by 2000 young people were off the Democrats' radar screen. Hans Riemer, Washington director of Rock the Vote, a group dedicated to registering young voters, recalls, "I was lobbying the Gore campaign to take young voters seriously, and the word I was getting was that their focus groups told them to give up on it. They felt it was an unreachable bloc and they weren't going to focus on it. And in the meantime, the Democrats' overall strategy for young people had changed. [Instead of] talking to them, they were talking to their parents. So when they talked about education, it wasn't about your debt or your opportunities but wanting to give tax breaks to your parents so they can afford your education."

If politics is a marketplace of ideas, Goldberg's observations are startlingly true: At a time when everyone else is spending billions on 18-to-24-year-olds to persuade them to buy their sneakers-soda-cigarettes-hair gel, the Democrats seem not to covet the young people's brand loyalty. And they may be ignoring the franchise at their own peril: Last spring, Harvard University's Institute of Politics released a survey suggesting that college students are a potential political powerhouse that could conceivably swing the next presidential election. Although the study noted that only 32 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds vote (young people have been voting less and less since they got the vote in 1972), 86 percent of their college-age respondents said they would definitely or probably vote in 2004.

It's not that young people don't want to vote, it's that they're not properly engaged by the candidates and parties, says Institute director Dan Glickman. "I recall that one of the students called the last election the 'Lipitor election,' because everything voters were hearing was about prescription drugs for older people," says Glickman. "Politicians tend to believe that whereas you can really hone in your message for older people, with young people you're dealing with an unpredictable group of people who can turn on you." The result, student leaders say, is a vicious demographic tautology in which politicians ignore young voters, who respond by not voting, thus justifying politicians' decision to ignore them.

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