Fred Gooltz's blog

Robert Putnam's editorial in The Boston Globe The rebirth of American civic life is remarkable.

In it, the superhero-tastic author of "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" and "Better Together: Restoring the American Community" fires a shot across the Clinton bow - - for what it's worth.

The first 4/5ths of his article is a very concise summation of what is blogged here; about the rise of the politically engaged and civic minded millennial generation.

My only beef with his retelling of the last 7 years of Bush is that he assigns September 11th as the prime motivating factor for the awakening of the new Greatest Generation (as he calls Millennials) - whereas for me, and many of us from the dot org boom, the swift destruction wrought by George Bush is what spurred me to action as Alex UA and I discussed previously.

But really, the closer of his article is amazing. Look at what Putnam says after building up the New Greatest Generation:

An extremely notable factor in Obama's victory today is the wave of civic participation and progressive ideological alignment among millennial voters. Young voters turned out for Obama and he won.

This trend, that of young voters turning out and voting at high rates, finally exploded into the political calculus only of the most astute followers of American politics in 2004. The nearly unprecedented engagement and voting continued through the 2006 midterms, and is now clearly poised to grow in 2008 behind Obama.

I can see a transformation in the motivation for this voting trend as one that started with passionate anti-Bush polarization in 2004, it solidified as a partisan Democratic Party trend in 2006 to limit the damage Bush could do for the last two years of his term, and now it's focused on fixing the damage Bush and the conservative movement has done after he leaves the White House. This progression is a clear maturation - which sadly has learned a hard lesson from the letdown of the 110th Congress.

Had Democrats actually done what they were elected to do in 2006 this wave would not only stayed overwhelmingly progressive, but it would have also been stridently Democratic. Unfortunately, after Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Rahm Emanuel aborted this possibility by being completely feckless dolts, it became only natural that frustrated voters should look elsewhere for leadership.

Enter the various deus ex machinae:
the Libertarian conservative anti-war Ron Paul
the fantastical ideology-free beltway darling Unity'08
the post-partisan Democrat-cum-Republican Media Mogul Mike Bloomberg
and now, Barack Obama the nebulous, is he progressive? a DLC conservative? Kinda?

The political world that Obama believes he lives in, the one where the culture war is declared moot and hate mongers like Ann Coulter are dropped from book deals, the world where petty legislative holds are exposed and the offending Senators are shamed into cooperation, the world where an anti-corruption Democratic politician can craft a lobbying-reform bill with a Republican without GOP lawyers inserting poison pills and Trojan horses to destroy the bill... it doesn't exist, no -- but it's the world that our Future Majority wants dearly to live in as well.

Will we get there? Maybe, someday.
If we do, politicians untethered from a principled worldview ideologically, nice talking technocrats, folks like Barack Obama likely will be the norm.
How far away are we from that world?

I think we're very far away; Ann Coulter is still a best-selling author, Sen. Tom Coburn brags about his record breaking obstructionism, John McCain weaseled his way into "working on" Obama and Feingold's anti-Lobbying legislation, ruining it and yet nobody said a word. So I think we're far away.
Obama thinks we're 382 days away. Would that we were. Would that we were.

Then again, I've been working in partisan DC politics longer than Obama, after all. Maybe I'm just old and jaded. Still, this is a victory for millennial politics.

The Des Moines Register-hosted Republican debate included a meatball question about education.  Progressives need to note what Giuliani said and learn how to correct his lies.

"Parents should choose the school that their child goes to, the same way people choose higher education," Giuliani said.

"Has it ever occurred to us that higher education is still the very, very best in the world, and you're asking me about K-12? Well, higher education is based on choice. It's based on a large consumer market. It's based on competition."

"It's the area of K-12 where we have this government command, sort of, approach. And if we give the choice to parents, where they can choose a private school or parochial school or public school, a charter school, home schooling, let them be the decider."

If only the world were as simple as Rudolph Giuliani...  thinks it is.

Recently, there have been an extraordinary number of dismissive, sneering media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers. 

"But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms."

Bobby Kennedy didn't travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage  - and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL's growth in the 1890s or of California's Wobblies in the 1930's have rolled their eyes at RFK's silly methods?  Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins.  No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited! 

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman's beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they're just all too Facebookey. "But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." Really? Online equals... quiet?  What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest.  (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman's head off his shoulders.) 

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet's free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones "twitter" and the dread facebook...  the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands. 

"This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves," said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing."

Jesse Lee over in Speaker Pelosi's office wrote up a fabulous post for The Gavel about Student Loans. Today, the House passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, H.R. 2669, which will provide the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill in 1944.


From The Gavel:

The House has passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, H.R. 2669, by a vote of 273-149. The bill will provide the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill in 1944. The legislation invests about $18 billion dollars over the next five years in reducing college costs, helping millions of students and families. It comes at no new cost to taxpayers, and is funded by cutting excess subsidies paid by the federal government to lenders in the student loan industry.

That means 149 goons voted against it. Let's look at the names of shame. In an update, [Below the fold]I'll compile the competitive races among these conservative anti-student goons with links to the Democratic challengers.

Attention House Challengers, if one of the Nay votes is your congressman, they voted against students. Talk to young voters in your district about that. And note Rep. Miller's tone...

Which brings me to today's reminder that, yes, Margaret, there is a difference between the parties:

Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA) went abso-effing-lutely ballistic against a Republican amendment aiming to kill the bill:

Believe it or not, Mike Bloomberg comes into play in this post about “Clean for Gene” and 1968. Here is my opinionated examination of the context of the tumultuous race and then my even more opinionated thoughts on how it might apply to hypotheticals involving Barack Obama.

3. "Clean for Gene" & R.F.K. - Eugene McCarthy believed he had no hope of beating President Johnson from the left in 1968, but he did it anyway. Gene announced that he was running to be the voice of the movement for a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War.

Subsequently, his candidacy took off on College Campuses across America. In New England, where there is a citizen-to-college ratio of roughly 1:3, young volunteers were the key to McCarthy's surprise finish in the New Hampshire primary. That fall, antiwar students in New England and elsewhere went "Clean for Gene," cutting their hair and shaving off their dirty hippy beards in order to canvass and GOTV for McCarthy.

When McCarthy won 20 of the 24 NH delegates, President Johnson crapped his pants. Four days later, previously chicken Robert F. Kennedy announced he wanted in on that action. After the new year, LBJ folded. McCarthy was still huge on campus, as Kennedy once joked, “Gene gets all the A students and I get all the C students.” As somebody who banked on his youthfulness and intelligence, Kennedy bristled at losing the support of the intelligentsia and college campuses.

More after the bump

Obama’s campaign draws comparisons to that of Howard Dean, most often in the context of his online fundraising and organizing.

Again, in keeping with my little formula, first an examination of the context of the race and then my thoughts on how it may or many not apply to hypotheticals involving Barack Obama. Caveat - my take on the context of the Dean movement is, shall we say "colored" by my participation in the Dean movement.

2. Dean for America – DFA was the culmination of a pushback movement against a conservative political punditry that enabled Gingrich’s slash and burn Republican destructiveness. For Dean, the progressive netroots (activist classes of 2000 and 2004) built new organizations, communication networks, and political structures precisely because the old structures had failed so badly from the impeachment of Bill Clinton leading to the midterms of 2002.

The Governor, an adversarial competitor who was unapologetic about his disagreements with the Conservative movement, and his “Deaniacs,” helped usher in a progressive wave predicated on the politics of opposition, an ethos based in part on Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 campaign.

In my mind, this case is the least applicable.

More after the bump.

I don't mean this great website, I mean the millennial generation. There has been some consternation about what the newly interested masses of Obamaniacs will do if, God forbid, Obama isn't on the ticket next year.

There have been a few Presidential campaigns in the modern presidency that appealed on a movement scale to young people. Based on some of our history, the major options would seem to fall the following:

Youth for Goldwater, Clean for Gene (& R.F.K.), Dean for America.
I’ll look at each, in a three part series. First with an examination of the context of the race and then my thoughts on how it may apply or not to hypotheticals involving Barack Obama.

1. Youth for Goldwater - a large movement of largely hegemonic teens who felt, as the ads said, "In your heart, you know he's right." The children of important people, youngsters like Chris Matthews and Hillary Rodham (Clinton) joined the Radical Squares to become part of this movement back in the day.

More after the bump.

Ever since NewsCorp put out that self-aggrandizing study on how MySpace is the best place ever to buy advertising, I've been thinking about what it means. The study was designed to double monthly advertising revenue from $30m to $60 and so much of the methodology is about brand identification and how well MySpacers react to banner ads versus flash ads etc. However, buried in the company's Press Release and tucked away in the study itself are a few gems that I think further one of my theories about how Millennials need and use Social Networks.

Take this quote for example from the PR:

”MySpace has thrived as a global community driven by self expression, discovery and connection of now more than 100 million people around the world who use it each month,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace. “Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives. Smart marketers know how to... meow meow meow[buy ads].

But did you catch that? I gotta say, that's pretty true, Chris. Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives.

But why...

This election will be won or lost on the internet. Specifically on MySpace. The campaign that has the most friends on MySpace will get Iowa Caucus voters to vote for them. Fact.

The development of Internet strategy that came out of the Dean for America movement, from plans on how to organize volunteers recruited online, to the technology development which will populate content across many website platforms and external webservices, spreading into niche communities via word-of-mouth… all of that pales in comparison to a Presidential Campaign’s ability to add friends on MySpace.

Popularity on MySpace has supplanted an entire industry and rendered moot all expertise in online politics aside from the ability to add friends.

The person on MySpace with the most friends shall be deemed President and the #2 finisher is the Vice President. Right now, I’m calling the race for Tom and then Dane Cook for Veep, and Lamp as Secretary of State.