A Kick in the Ass and a Dose of Optimism (aka our part in '08)

In the comments, all of us here at FM got a good swift kick in the ass for being "curmudgeonly, cynical veterans. " It was all in good faith, and while I don't think we're that dated, (we all hit the scene in '04), some good points were made that I'd like to address.

Some of us may sound skeptical of the current crop of candidates, and yes, we may be a little jaded by our experience with the Dean campaign. Maybe we could use a dose of optimism in our writing. I tend to think not that I'm pessimistic, but rather that I'm just realistic about how things are shaking down.

But Joshua was absolutely right that we do need to do something this cycle. He suggested this:

Start finding creative and effective ways to share your wisdom and experience with the next generation that is rising up and being transformed like many of you were in 2003/2004. There’s a whole movement springing up around Obama and from what I’m seeing, most of them are starting from scratch with little knowledge of what went down before, nor of what needs to be happening to carry on your own advances.

There's a lot to unpack here. Some of it is right, other parts are a little off.

There are two ways that this can happen:

1. Directly influence how the campaigns operate
2. Create a resource that is geared not just to this cycle or to campaign staffers, but all youth organizers for independent action and for future campaigns

In terms of influencing campaigns, here's the lay of the land as I see it:

(and I invite any staffer from Obama, Edwards - or any Democratic campaign - to comment and/or guest blog if I am mistaken in these conclusions or if they would like to speak to our readers about their youth programs)

First you have the "old-hands" running the youth operations at these campaigns. I don't have any access to the Hillary camp, but Hans Reimer from Rock the Vote is Obama's youth vote director, and Ivan Frishberg of the New Voters Project, Young Voter PAC, and PIRG is running Edwards' youth show. These guys have tried and true (tested) strategies that have been developed over the last few years, and mostly involve P2P field tactics. Whether this means the Vote Mob model or merely canvassing apartment complexes and dorm storming is an open question. What this means for military "youth" or young families is another question entirely and about which I have no idea as to their strategy. On the whole, will these folks be as creative as I'd like and try innovative things? Probably not. Hopefully those innovative things will continue to happen organically.

Second is the "young'ns" like Tobin (Students for Barack Obama) and Sam (formerly of The Nation), who will refine new strategies that have been battle-tested (though not studied) in 2006 - fundraising via social networking, building voter files from MySpace and FaceBook, creative use of video blogging, etc. Hopefully these new tactics and the more tried and true stuff will be fully integrated, and the "young" and "internet" divisions of the campaigns will play well with the "political" and "field" departments.

By November 2008, these two sets of staffers will probably accomplish four very important goals:

• Convince campaigns once and for all of the importance of reaching out to young voters.
• Enshrine P2P outreach (as opposed no outreach or Old/New Media - New buys) as the gold standard for campaigns looking to reach young voters
• Create/test best practices for campaigns using social networking and media
• Firmly kill the meme that young voters are apathetic and do not turnout.

They may not be as sexy as Revolution!, but those will not be insignificant accomplishments.

How much we can feed into this process is an open question. In terms of directly influencing the campaigns, I'm acquainted with the folks running both the Obama and Edwards' youth operations, and as I said, I hope to get them to post/comment here about their work or agree to sit for interviews. On the more formal tip, I've already made inquiries about getting in on all the blogger and youth press calls with these campaigns. We'll see what happens. I'll try my damndest in the coming months to get those staffers to visit the site for interviews or guest blogs. I already know that they read the site, so in terms of at least getting new ideas out there, the channels are open.

As for this the second option (creating a resource):

start (continue) crystalizing some of your “movement memory” and find ways to pass it down (in digestible, comprehensible ways) into the front-line trenches of today.

Right on. This is what I'm excited about and see as one of Future Majority's main projects over the next year. This is pretty much the idea behind the wiki - which isn't as far along as I'd like it to be, or as full of information as I'd like. A big part of the redesign will consist of making it much more user friendly (more like Wikipedia). When I finish the book, I'll start to put a lot more effort into building that out. I also have committments from a number of Democratic youth organizations to promote the wiki to their members (as a resource and as potential contributors) once the redesign is done.

That's what I can do. The rest I need to come from you guys. I won't point fingers (yet), but Joshua is right. There is a lot of institutional memory in the readership of this blog. And that can all be dumped into the wiki in some pretty easy FAQ, 1-2-3 type documents. Between the lot of us, we should be able to put together a pretty damned interesting compilation of articles about technology, social networking, p2p and cultural outreach, etc. We've already got some decent stuff up about campus organizing, and entry level jobs/training in the movement. But we can do a lot better. And I intend to see that we do.

If you have ideas about improving the wiki, or ways we can distribute the workload - I'd love to hear it. A smallish problem that an army of folks could do with little effort involves creating a standardized formatting for articles, and for putting disclaimers into articles with little or no content. There are lots of little tasks like that which could be farmed out to people who want to contribute but don't have the experience at this point.

As for the suggestion that we throw our lot in with one of the candidates - I'm actually against that. Some may see the stars of transformational politics aligning behind Barack Obama. I'm less convinced, and in any case, I think that it's foolish to dump our eggs in one basket. I'm not at all against people promoting their candidates here in the comments, or even in their blogs. But this should be a place where all the candidates can - and do - come to talk about their youth efforts, reach an audience of young, engaged activists, and eventually share best practices that will elevate our nominee above the GOP candidate. That seems like a worthwhile project for this site.