Keys to a Future Majority : After the Election and Towards the Majority

November 2nd, 2004 was a dark day for me and tens-of-millions of other progressives around the nation. Despite a faltering economy, a war of choice that was sold with lies and horribly executed, and rising health care and tuition costs, George W. Bush, our own Nero, won reelection. John Kerry, the terribly out-of-touch, indecisive, and uninspiring Democratic candidate, couldn’t convince the nation that he would be better than the current disaster, and so the nation voted for Bush.

Though conventional wisdom holds that Kerry lost over “values” voters, the most compelling statistics that I have seen paint a different picture. In fact, it seems that Kerry lost on the issues of Terrorism and National Security. It appears that the Bush and Republican-aligned Campaigns (such as the infamous and typically ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) were able to convince many Americans that George W. Bush was a more capable handler of the War on Terror, and they were able to use John Kerry’s Vietnam service against him. I believe I had been correct in guessing that the election would hinge upon a war fought 30 years ago; that the memories of that important time in the lives of many, if not most, of the voting public would call upon the lessons of that war and color the decisions that these people made. However, I was completely wrong to believe that this would help John Kerry. I thought that people would look at this war as a new Vietnam and reject the President who put us there. Instead, the behavior of Kerry and other Democrats during the tumultuous 60s and 70s, and especially their protests of Vietnam, is what was brought to mind by skillful Republican messengers.

My conviction that perceptions about security and strength amongst the group that came of age around Vietnam determine the outcome of the election, and not so-called values like hatred of homosexuals, was hardened a few months after the Presidential election. In the most Republican district in the entire American North East, Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District, a little known Iraq War Veteran named Paul Hackett decided to run for office as a Democrat, in a special election for that district’s U.S. House Seat. Hackett, who said that those who opposed Gay Marriage were “un-American,” narrowly lost his election to Jean Schmidt, 48-52. Bush had won the district with 64% of the vote less than a year before.

Even though we lost the battle, I felt the war was still on, and by the 4th of November I was ready to get back to work and prepare for the next fight. As the exit poll data began to stream in I could tell that I had not worked in vain. Youth voting around the nation was at its highest levels since 1992, and one of the highest since 18-year olds gained the right to vote, and young people voted overwhelmingly for change. In Pennsylvania, where I focused my attention, almost half of people under 30 voted, and in the mid-west states Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, where there are more college educated youth, almost two-thirds of this age group went to the polls. In three of these four states young people were the deciding factor in Kerry’s victory, with, for example, 67% of those under 25 voting for Kerry in PA, the only demographic to give him a majority. Kerry won in PA with 51% of the vote, meaning that the much maligned and underappreciated young voters were the deciding factor in the election . Around the nation, young people turned out to vote, and as the following map, created by MfA’s former tech genius Josh Koenig, shows, our nation would have gotten the change that we desperately need if young people had had their say.

These results vindicated a few of the theories that I started out with. First of all, it shows that young people can be turned out in good numbers to go to the polls. Young people almost never vote at the levels of older Americans, but they can be convinced to vote at very high levels. Though the votes of young people cannot determine the outcome of an election on their own, these voters can be a deciding factor, as they were in PA, MN, and WI. And as we can see in the above map, if Democrats continue to make inroads amongst young people, they will eventually reach majority status in this nation. As I said, the battle may have been lost, but the war for the heart and soul of this nation still rages on.

And as with any dedicated soldier, I desperately wanted to get back out in the field with Music for America and keep the momentum amongst my generation going. But, unfortunately, MfA had a major shake-up after the election, with almost all of the staff, including most of my friends and the entire New York office, either leaving the organization or getting fired, depending on who you ask and believe about what happened. I wasn’t present at the breakup, so I can’t say with confidence what happened or why, but the effect was that MfA would lose almost all of the people who believed in and evangelized for its political vision. It would also, eventually, decide to eschew almost all of the principles that Mike had convinced me were most effective. Instead of continuing to focus on face-to-face encounters and personal connections across the nation, MfA decided to move its entire staff, or at least the ones who didn’t quit or get fired, out to the liberal oasis of San Francisco and is now focusing on getting out the youth vote via weekly e-mail updates and text messages. This would be slightly less comically tragic if CIRCLE hadn’t found, in a 2004 survey, that these two methods were looked at the least favorable of any voter outreach method (PDF). Amongst liberal minded voters the most popular methods of outreach were, by far, Online Chat-rooms (equivalent to the MfA forum where I first engaged Mike), meetups (for MfA this would be going out to a show), and blogs. This harebrained voter-outreach scheme guarantees, in my mind, that MfA will fade away into irrelevance. And without any of the founders of the organization, with all of the people with the political vision and most of the connections to the broader political and cultural scenes leaving the organization, I decided that I would move on and search out other means of remaining involved.

At first I was a bit nervous about moving on and away from Music for America. I still believed that the model advocated by the founders was the one that we needed to work with, and MfA had a recognized brand associated with the model. I also held onto some small hope that the staff and the organization’s board would eventually realize the mistake they all had made by splitting the group up and basically scuttling the organization. But as the weeks rolled by, I decided that I needed to move on and so I cast off on my own, looking around for a meaningful way to remain engaged.

The first thing that I did was start my own blog, another aspect of politics that Music for America introduced me to. When I first heard of blogs I thought that they were vanity sites where people wrote nasty things about their boss or significant other. As the election went on, and especially once it ended, I came to see that blogs were in fact creating some of the exact infrastructure whose absence I lamented during the election. Sites like Daily Kos and MyDD were in no way vanity sites, and served the extremely important function of providing an online community for progressives as well as putting out meaningful and unfiltered progressive messages. The Right may still dominate talk radio and TV news, but I had finally located commentary that I found both inspiring and educational, and I embraced it as many other millions have been doing since 2004.

I decided that the best way for me to set up a blog was to try and get out in front of some message or idea that I thought would catch on, and so I created a blog dedicated to drafting Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the man who originally gave me the inspiration to get involved in 2003, to switch parties—he claims to be a Republican and I believe he’s a true liberal—and run for some national office. I gave the blog the obvious name of “Draft Zinni!” and the tagline “It’s Security, Stupid.” I thought the blog could serve two purposes, both which went far beyond Zinni. First, if a person with impeccable National Security credentials was able to make it onto a Democratic ticket, especially one without the taint of Vietnam-era protesting, it would be a great way to counter the erroneous image of Democrats as soft on security, which I believe to be the reason why Kerry lost. Second, I wanted to force as many people on the left as possible to consider what they would think of as a liberal or progressive national security stance. In my eyes General Zinni gave liberals a blueprint for how to think about and execute a comprehensive National Security platform, and I wanted others on the left to either accept this platform as their own, or at least debate with me about it and come up with one that they felt comfortable with.

After Paul Hackett’s near upset in Ohio I started to modify the focus of the site to include all of the veterans who decided to run for office as Democrats, making it the first website to highlight the huge numbers of Vets, which I called “Security Dems” but which are usually referred to as the “Fighting Dems,” who decided to jump in the ring and run for open seats or against Republican incumbents. Over the course of the past year there have been over 70 veterans running as Democrats for Congress across the US—in some cases there were two vets running for the same seat, in some cases a vet got beaten in the primary, and others dropped out for various personal reasons. There were also two running for Senate, one of whom, Paul Hackett, dropped out of the Ohio Democratic primary race after he was stabbed in the back by the Democratic leaders who convinced him to run, and another, James Webb, who won a bruising primary in Virginia and will now face George Allen in November. Through Draft Zinni! I also met a number of progressive national security bloggers, and after I invited a few of them to meet up for a drink, we decided to start a community blog for discussing progressive security, called Blue Force, which I designed and host.

Even though the blogs gave me something productive to do with my political energies, I was not about to turn my back on the lessons I had learned from Music for America, especially the use of cultural activities as a vehicle for change, and so I looked around for another organization combining events and politics where I could get involved. I found just such a group when Mike Connery told me about a weekly event called Drinking Liberally (DL). DL is a meetup (a semi-formal, regularly scheduled event organized online but held offline) that started in NYC in 2003. After the elections, Drinking Liberally started to open itself up to people in other cities who were willing to follow the few rules they set: the chapter has to meet regularly (weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly), it has to be free of charge, it cannot be "presented by" any other group, and it cannot endorse specific politicians or candidates. In return each chapter is given a space and link on the website, a local blog, and is sent buttons to hand out at the event. DL quickly spread across the nation; currently there are around 150 chapters, located in 41 states plus the District of Colombia, as well as one international chapter in Dublin, Ireland.

While the premise of Drinking Liberally might sound a bit flaky (after all drinking isn’t really that productive an activity) it filled an extremely valuable niche that was missing during the 2004 election campaign. DL provided a social space, for little to no money, where progressive activists, bloggers, and other left-leaning people could come and socialize. The fact that bloggers such as Ducan Black (aka Atrios), Chris Bowers (MyDD), and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (aka Kos of Daily Kos) promoted DL on their blogs and attended DLs in their towns (Duncan and Chris in Philly, Markos in the bay area) meant that not only did DL become well known, some DLs actually had combined readerships that rivaled those of big news outlets. DLs also became a space where progressive minded people could regularly come to network, finding out about job openings, events, and political gossip.

Recently Drinking Liberally’s parent organization, Cosmopolity, started to host other social events with political angles. There’s Laughing Liberally, a liberal stand-up comedy show, which is just about to go on its first national tour. There also is Reading Liberally, a progressive book club, Screening Liberally, a movie night dedicated to some movie with a broader social message, Swinging Liberally, a progressive softball league, and Blogging Liberally, a more formal meeting between bloggers and policy makers and experts. Recently Markos and Jermoe Armstrong, from MyDD, traveled to Drinking Liberallys across the nation to promote their book about the new online politics, Crashing the Gates, and more book tours are in the works. Cosmopolity also hosts a progressive events calendar for NYC, which I maintain along with DL’s founder, and one of the Left’s unsung heroes-- Justin Krebs.

And then, about 10 months after the election, I met with Sean Agnew (along with Cosmopolity’s David Alpert) at one of his shows in Philly and proposed to him my idea for a joint venture linking politics and culture. Amazingly, he not only agreed to consider it, he enthusiastically supported the idea. And so, over the past 9 months the idea has taken shape, with a full business plan written by myself and a few others (which recently won a business plan competition at Temple University’s Business School). At this very moment we are a week or two away from incorporating, and hopefully a few months away from opening. Rather than rehash all of the things that I’ve written about the music venue/progressive space, I will post a letter written by Mike Connery and myself, with assistance from other advisors on the project, as the next part of this series.