Future Majority Blogs

I'm headed to the airport. Will try to upload video before and a recap before my flight takes off. Here are pictures from Wednesday and Thursday at the DNC. Oh, and what do folks think about Palin as the GOP VP? I don't know much about her but the folks I'm with are saying she's a scandal-ridden, ex-beauty queen with only 2 years experience as the governor. Essentially, McCain chose a women candidate as a token gesture and negated any ability to attack Obama on experience.

I have three awesome videos of about youth participation at the convention from Howard Dean, Alexandra Acker of YDA, and another women whose name I missed talking about the delegate count. Unfortunatey, my Flip camera USB connection seems to be busted and I can't upload them. So no pretty movies, just text.

Acker, the Executive Director of the Young Democrats, has been to three conventions. She's been everything from a volunteer to a super delegate back before anyone even cared about super delegates. She noted that youth participation in general is way up this year. As I've noted before, young people are 16% of all convention participants and there are 631 actual youth delegates.

Acker noted, however, that there are places where youth participation continues to lag. Young delegates are still not equal to young voter's share of the Democratic electorate (technically all demographics are supposed to be represented in proportion to their share of the electorate). And thus far, there have been no young speakers on the podium during the convention. Many of us expected to see a passing of the torch as Chelsea Clinton introduced her mother, and Acker expressed disappointment that Chelsea's role was reduced to narrating a video about her mother's life.

At the final DNC Youth Council meeting today - which was probably the highest attendance I've yet seen at a Youth Council Event, Howard Dean told all the young participants that they need to vote early, get their friends to vote, and get their parents to vote, but voting is not enough. Young people need move beyond voting and start running for office. This echoed a speech Dean delivered at Netroots Nation earlier in the summer.

In terms of non-delegate youth faces within the hall, the DNC Youth Council handed out a number of passes (not sure how many yet) to Invesco Field, and College Democrats were also able to get may of their members credentials to see Obama's acceptance speech. This seems to be the exception of the week, however, not the rule. Credentials to the Pepsi Center for young people were few and far between, and word is that the College Democrats weren't able to offer any credentials at all on Mon - Wed. This seems like a big oversight on the part of the DNCC.

In short: more young people than ever are participating as delegates this year, but young faces in the rest of the hall are fewer and far between for any young Democratic activists lacking insider connections. And for a political party that is riding a new wave of support among young voters, the lack of young faces addressing the convention is very disappointing.

What's more fun than watching an inspirational speaker deliver soaring oratory as he historically accepts his party's nomination?

Doing so with drink in hand, of course.

So sip if he says "hope" -- really when he says it -- and enjoy the other rules below to share a celebratory toast as you drink liberally tonight.

Take a Sip when
He Says:
- hope
- change
- community organizer
- Bush
- Hillary Clinton
or when:
- he says how much he loves America
- he tells a joke that actually makes you laugh
- he implicitly/explicitly compares himself to MLK
- compliments Michelle for being accomplished

If you ever wanted to know what we all looked like here we are.

Michael Connery, Sarah Burris, and Kevin Bondelli

A new group Eklectyk Creative Media with Napalm Clique has produced an Obama hiphop video/mashup posted on youtube this week.

The video begins with an excerpt from Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech, and launches into a multimedia collection of the political candidate. It has strong video-editing and lots of creativity behind it. video have truly raised the bar for independent Hip Hop artists. In this production, real Hip Hop is used as a vehicle to inspire youth to vote and become involved in national politics.

According to the release "the director of the video is at the Democratic Convention to spread the word about his project."

Crazy night. I got kicked out of the hall because there weren't enough seats, tried in vain to find the blogger press room and briefly ended up in the basement, peering up into the main floor through one of those big entryways the Zamboni's go through when it's hockey season. Because of all the running around I missed Clinton and Kerry, though did manage to catch a bit of Kerry's McCain the Candidate/McCain the Senator comparisons. That was pretty strong, though Kerry's delivery still gives me nightmares of 2004 . . .

I thought Duckworth had the best speech of the night (that I saw). Strong delivery, promoted the troops, tough on McCain. I wonder how her injuries played on TV . . . did they show it?

Biden was a huge disappointment. The speech seemed schizophrenic. The first 20 minutes sounded like an attempt to connect with the "white working class voters" that Obama supposedly has so many problems with. The delivery was soft, it got a little wonky at times and I was wondering - didn't we pick Biden to be the attack dog? Where were the attacks?

When he finally did start hitting McCain, it seemed rushed, too little too late, and almost like he just jumped into a different speech mid-delivery. Someone suggested that Biden was losing his voice and saved it all for the end - sounds slightly plausible, but the effect is still the same.

Obama's surprise appearance was a strong finish. It riled up a crowd dulled down by Biden's mostly soporific speech.

What did you think? How did it all look on TV? I've seen zero TV coverage, read almost no news since I've been here, and feel completely disconnected from anything that isn't in front of my face.

uploaded as fast as i could.
see more at Flickr Page

So the post I wrote on the Trick or Vote Party may go up on AlterNet. I'll post a link when that happens, or post in full here if it doesn't. In the meantime, though, I wanted to point people to a video - one of three or four - that the Bus Federation showed at their trick or vote party.

This is the only one online at the moment, but these are some of the best videos I've ever seen come out of a youth vote organization. It's fun, witty, it doesn't feel like it is trying too hard, and it's selling some serious activism.

I just got back from my panel at the Sea Change forum called "The Youngest Voter." Attendance was low and two of the panel participants didn't show up. I think the fact that the forum is within the perimeter and only accessible by delegates and participants is killing the attendance levels.

Even so, the panel was excellent. The focus was a documentary film by Michael Moore protege Jason Pollock called "The Youngest Candidate." The film follows four teenagers as they wage their first campaigns for mayor, city council, and school board. None of the candidates win, but the film presents a hard headed look at their idealism, determination, mistakes, and small victories on the campaign trail.

Jason is still looking for a distributor and anyone who can help him out should do so. This is a great, great film that needs to be seen.

I don't have much more to say about Day Two at the convention. I'll have another post shortly about the Trick or Vote party. The convention itself was intense. I was stuck up in the nosebleeds stage left, but even from their the roar of the crowd and thousands of unity signs were pretty amazing. I thought Clinton's speech did what it needed to do, but to be honest I've never been a fan of her speaking style. I just can't get as emotionally involved when she speaks. Anyway, I'm sure you've all already read a dozen news articles critiquing Hilary's speech so I won't waste more words on that. I will say that for my money, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer absolutely blew me away. I love that guy.

Another day filled with more events than anyone could possibly attend. Here’s a rundown of what happened on my end during the first part of the day.

After some abortive attempts at blogging and another trek to the no-man’s land where they hide the credentials, the first event of the day was the DNC Youth Council’s panel on youth organizing.

I think the event went fairly well, though it could have been better. We smartly skipped over presentations and went straight to Q&A. There was more than the normal share of crazy questioners who go to the mic more to rant than to ask a question, though to be fair, a young Hillary delegate did stand up and make a great call for unity - among young Democrats and the delegates in general. Other questions ranged from how best to learn the ropes of the inside rules and protocols that makes local party politics function, to best practices for getting young Latinos to the polls.

Thomas Bates of Democrats Work had a brilliant retort to the question about inside politics, that essentially boils down to: start your own organization, rally your friends, and change the way the inside politics works in your neighborhood. Considering the successes of Democrats Work these past few years, and my own experiences in politics, which essentially consists of telling people they were wrong until people paid attention and changed the way they operated, I think he’s got a pretty solid leg to stand on.

With regard to the format, though, it seems like the DNC Youth Council should be able to get more time for events and smaller panels that are more focused. There were ten of us on the panel and it was hard to get a word in edgewise. Any combination of 4 of us probably could have fielded all the questions that came our way. Pretty much the only thing I managed to say was a brief call for people to check out MoveOn's Vote Poke tool and a call to make Election Day registration a future project for youth orgs after November. I think more focused, smaller panels might be a more productive route in the future, though I understand that it gets harder to marshal press to multiple events during what is already a busy week.

I was a little disappointed to see that more College Democrats didn’t attend the panel. To be sure, it looked like CDA composed a decent portion of the audience (press and young delegates made up the rest), but considering that CDA’s national convention is happening concurrent to the DNCC, I would have hoped for a larger audience from the college crowd who are a big part of the future of youth organizing. I’m not sure what the story is there.

Kevin and I were discussing and it seemed like the second panel of the day, featuring young candidates and elected officials like Tim Ryan, Scott Kleeb and Congressman Greg Meeks seemed much more focused, and offered a good accounting of what it takes to run for office. The questions were also much more focused, and I have no doubt that helped as well.

Later in the day there was a panel on Hip Hop Politics, which I wanted to attend - especially in light of my recent post, which is getting some positive and negative reactions offline - but blogging duty called and I had to spend a few hours hunkered down at the Big Tent.

That turned out to be a pretty good move, as I got interviewed by the Chicago Sun Times about blogging. That was a little weird. I’m used to talking to media about young voters, not blogging. It was an adjustment and my talking points weren’t quite as polished. Hopefully it came out OK. By happenstance, I was interviewed at the same time as Georgia10 from Daily Kos, who stepped in with great answers when I got stumped. I also got shot for B-roll by ABC News. I guess they wanted to see “blogging” in action. Maybe you’ll see my mug or the Future Majority logo on the TeeVee. Let me know if you do. And if anyone attended the Hip Hop panel and wants to blog about it, shoot me an email.