Thoughts on a Better New Deal

Last Friday I attended the Better Deal Conference, a gathering of young activists to discuss the creation of a new progressive economic policy that addresses the issues facing our nation and our generation.

As Tamara Drout, one of the conference organizers noted in an article in the American Prospect, young Americans today are the first generation that may actually end up with a lower standard of living than their parents. On average, we graduate college with $20k of debt and enter into an outsourced, service-industry dominated economy in which health care has been decoupled from employment. For those of us who don't make it into college, it is becoming near impossible to earn a middle class living with just a high school diploma.

The issue is timely, to say the least.

Andy Stern (SEIU) and Katrina Vanden Heuvel (The Nation) delivered the keynote addresses (morning and afternoon, respectively), and there were some truly informative panels including:

• Paycheck Politics - covering the quality of jobs available to young people in the New Economy
• Getting a Life - affordability barriers to the necessities of a middle class life
• Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Destiny - exploring the intersection of race and class among Millennials.
• I myself sat on a panel entitled "We're Broke and We Vote - about youth GOTV efforts and the economy as an election issue for Millennials.

I won't sum up all the panels. CSpan was filming live all day and you can watch each panel by clicking the links above, or by going here. There were a few big takeaways from the day that I would like to mention:

• There was a lot of talk about recognizing that class is what divides us even more than race - particularly as a movement. Issues like green jobs, which can lift up poor Latinos and African Americans in inner cities, or poor rural whites equally, can create new ties and partnerships between traditionally disparate groups.
• tThe conference was full of college students and recent grads. Young people's debt burden is "pricing them out' of the nonprofit sector and traditional organizing jobs within the movement, but there are a variety of more professional roles that attendees can aspire to that will allow them to do well by doing good. The movement needs lawyers, researchers, economists and more just as much as good organizers. There needs to be a broader understanding of how this work will happen and where we can all fit in.
• Most importantly (at least to me since it came up numerous times during the voting panel), we need to think more about what happens on November 5th. All of our energies seem focused on getting out the vote. This is a good - and as I've noted a very new - thing. But the off year of the cycle (2009) is a very big open question. How will we shift gears from GOTV to policy? How will we make sure that the candidate fulfills their promises to young voters and institutes a Better Deal for "Generation Debt?" I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's pretty clear that we're going to need to have a large conference of some kind in which the issue orgs and the GOTV orgs all get in the same room and work out some kind of plan.

On this last point, I thought that the big elephant in the room that no one was really talking about was the Obama campaign, particularly in light of the recent post by Matt Stoller outlining how Obama is short-circuiting the influence partisan, "outside organizations" on the process and is in a position to rewire the Democratic Party in his own image.

Sen. Obama probably has a bigger "youth" list than all the youth vote and youth policy organizations out there combined. What does he plan to do with it after election day - win or lose? How will he keep his Millennial Movement engaged in effective action beyond his election towards the accomplishment of real progressive policy goals? We have no idea because his campaign won't tell us.

Clearly we need to start planning for "Day One" ourselves, and judging by the energy in the room there are lots of people itching to get started. When that time comes, hopefully Sen. Obama will join us and won't let all that energy and potential activism go to waste once the campaign reaches its end.

One final thought. A few weeks ago I attended a similar conference by the Roosevelt Institution called A New New Deal (again, the economy is the # 1 issue for young voters and reestablishing the kind of social safety net that gave our parents and grandparents a leg up into the middle class weighs heavily on everyone's mind). Despite the similar topics, these were two very different conferences. Roosevelt's conference felt very much an insider event. A number of stars from the Democratic economic policy apparatus were in attendance and the audience was composed of as many policy wonks as young, aspiring policy wonks. It was a networking event for young people to climb into the circles of Democratic public policy. Yesterday's event was a much more hands-on, learning experience for young activists whose constituents face economic hardships. With a 1 hour "Roots Camp" at the end of the day, it was very much a pragmatic conference. I suspect that both are needed if we are to create a leadership pipeline for young policy types and create quality organizing campaigns around the issues. But it is worth noting the difference between the two.