Youth Wave Pushes Obama Over The Top

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.