media

Following up further on establishing a better communications apparatus for youth organizers, I wanted to point everyone to this article in the New York Times:

Television Starts to Court Young Voters:

With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers. On cable news, CNN promotes a “League of First Time Voters” and the Fox News Channel is covering what it calls the Y Factor with a full-time correspondent. On broadcast, NBC has assigned Luke Russert, the son of the late anchor Tim Russert, to the youth vote beat and ABC, CBS and PBS are all running stories by student journalists.

It's not just about trying to revive their business model by drawing in more, and younger, eyeballs. The networks genuinely seem to get that they are missing out on the youth vote story:

Heather Nauert, a Fox News Channel correspondent, started covering the youth vote in February, one month after exit polls started showing significant spikes in turnout rates. “We basically said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a big story and we’ve got to cover it,’ ” she said. On Fox, Ms. Nauert’s reports have appeared on the network’s nightly news program “The Fox Report” and were compiled for an hourlong special report, “The Y Factor,” last month.
...
About 6.5 million people under 30 participated in the primaries and caucuses this year, almost double the number that turned out in 2000. Mr. Todd said that he believed the surge in youth interest had not been sufficiently captured by media organizations.

“It’s because of something I call the ‘been there, done that’ disease,” he said. “We hear about the young vote all the time, and at the end of the day, does it show up?” It did in 2004, he said, answering his own question, “but everybody showed up in 2004.”

Since then, the demographics have shifted. “We are seeing a partisan divide between young and old like we haven’t seen before,” Mr. Todd said. “This is a big part of this election.”

In response, the major cable and network news channels are all staffing up to cover the youth vote this cycle. This presents us with an opportunity that we didn't have in 2004. In '04, everyone was a skeptic and few outlets wanted to do more than cover major celebrity efforts like Vote or Die when writing their token youth vote article.

This year, we may actually have a corps of reporters who are open to learning about what's really going on in youth organizing when you look behind Christina Aguilera, TI or other celebrity spokespersons. Young viewers - more in tune with getting their news online - may not watch the segments produced by this new campaign corps, but other journalists - editors, reporters, print, online, TV - do watch their coverage. While I would never advocate for a solely top-down communications strategy, these jouralists represent a good chance to "influence the influencers," and make sure that the correct story about youth participation is getting told.

Here's how the article lays them out:

Fox News - Heather Nauert
CNN - League of First Time Voters; lead reporter: ???????
MSNBC - Luke Russert
NBC News - Luke Russert
ABC News - Student Journalists. Schools TBD?
CBS News - ???????

Hopefully these people or representatives of these projects will all attend the Youth Press Conference at the DNC so we can put faces, emails, and phone number to names. These reporters need to look past the celebrities and examine the grass roots organizing. They need to understand the value of peer to peer organizing and the proper role of the internet. Above all, they need to understand that increased youth turnout is a trend, not a fluke. We don't want anymore major media stories like this one.

Michael recently called out the New York Times on their dismal profile of Declare Yourself for subliminally playing into the popular fallacies about the youth vote and youth turnout. Unfortunately, this is just one example in a long-standing problem with media coverage of young voters.

As it turns out, these repeated fallacies about young people being apathetic, not turning out, et al may be more damaging than we previously thought. To uncover the hidden damage done by the media's false narrative we must look into the field of social psychology.

In Dr. Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, there is a chapter on commitment and consistency. Here is a passage that may help shed some light on the potential negative effects of this narrative:

What those around us think is true of us is enormously important in determining what we ourselves think is true. For example, one study found that after hearing that they were considered charitable people, New Haven, Connecticut, housewives gave much more money to a canvasser from the Multiple Sclerosis Association. Apparently the mere knowledge that someone viewed them as charitable caused these women to make their actions consistent with another's perception of them.

Potential young voters are constantly hearing that they do not vote, will not vote, and that they don't care. The danger lying herein is that some young voters that are not directly engaged may act, or not act as it is, because of unconscious consistency.

This may seem like a bunch of crap psycho-babble, but think about it for a moment. How often have we seen organizations talk about how to make voting "cool?" There have been efforts to combat a negative stigma towards political engagement and voting. We have a situation where the media says that young people don't vote, a young person may think: "I'm young. Nobody expects me to vote anyway. Other young people aren't voting. Why bother?"

This is a big reason why it is important to push back on these fallacious media narratives about young voters.

On the bright side, good media coverage and stories about young people getting involved have that positive effect on young voters. Good coverage also provides social proof that other young people are being engaged and voting.

This is also another reason why vote pledges are so important. As I wrote in an earlier post a while back, vote pledges involve an even more powerful use of the principles of commitment and consistency. The individual pledge to vote, a personal act of commitment, overwhelms the effect of demographic consistency.

What do you think? Does the false media narrative potentially lead to this danger, or am I just spouting psychobabble? Share your thoughts in the comments.

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

...

Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
...
Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.

Some light summer reading.

• Did Obama lift the ban on independent expenditures to outside groups? Maybe so. The real question is, will donors listen and how much can we get done in the time that is left.
• Obama to announce VP pick via text message. - First Read
• In a changing corner of PA, a glimpse of Obama's "age problem." - Washington Post
• The Bradley Effect or the Obama Effect: what aren't the polls telling us? - Huffington Post
• Could religious youth tip the election this fall? - Fox News
• Politics Unusual: Hip Hop's Hopes for Obama. - Huffington Post
• Help Our Veterans Vote - New York Times
• A New Generation of Black Leaders Looks to Lead - Hip Hop Caucus
• Are We Neglecting the Next Generation of Activists? - The American Prospect
• Court Supports Rights of Gay Students - AlterNet
• In Virginia, 64% of the states new voters are under 35. - InRich.com
• Early history of the Creative Commons. - Lessig Blog
• Rock the Vote is finally getting ready to air their Christina Aguilera PSA. - Washington Post

Over at Salon's The War Room, Thomas Schaller is commenting on the same Nate Silver op-ed in the NY Post that Craig and I posted about. Reading his blog post I have to ask - did Tom Schaller even read past the first paragraph, because he totally misrepresents Silver's thesis (emphasis mine):

Silver throws a bit of cold water on the idea that the youth vote is something Democrats should be counting on this year. And history, as he points out, is on his side. But the dismal turnout numbers he cites are for the 18-to-24 subset of the youth vote, which is often grouped more broadly to include those 25 to 29, who register and turn out at higher rates. Still, even 18-to-29-year-olds rank lowest of any American age cohort in turnount.

Silver argues nothing of the kind, as I've written. While the subtitle of the piece presents young voters in a negative light, that subtitle was likely written not by Silver but by a conservative editor at the Post.

Here's what Silver has to say about the piece on his own blog:

In an article in today's New York Post, I argue that Barack Obama actually does have a pretty good likelihood of increasing youth turnout -- and that, moreover, such voters may be undercounted in the polls:

It doesn't sound like Silver is splashing cold water on anything. You can leave a comment for Schaller on the blog. I've already done so.

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns and Nathan Henderson-James

We spend a lot of time in these news updates showing how charges of voter fraud are used to discredit voter participation efforts and prime the pump for voter suppression efforts, such as the passage of voter ID bills, pushing for proof of citizenship, engaging in draconian voter purge efforts, and imposing sever restrictions on voter registration drives. We have also spent a lot of time carefully delineating the politics behind these efforts, starting with our March 2007 report The Politics Of Voter Fraud and continuing on in these diaries to name but two venues.

What is striking about how the process of disenfranchisement and voter suppression works is how much it relies upon the media to repeat and amplify the breathless and hyperbolic accusations of so-called voter fraud against voter registration drives. If journalists were to spend any time at all investigating the sensational claims - often made by people with a direct partisan interest in the outcome of an election - they would find that the accusations are mostly taken out of context, are limited to a few instances, and have never, ever, been proven to have resulted in any fraudulent vote being cast.

Sadly, the history of this issue shows that it has been bereft of this kind of basic journalism, even through the 2006 mid-term elections. This is important because haphazard reporting of partisan claims of voter fraud without checking the facts is how the media helps these voter suppression efforts. These stories not only deter potential voters from getting on the rolls, but, as noted above, inspire bad election reforms aimed at disenfranchising voters, particularly those that are currently underrepresented in the electorate.

A prime example of this kind of lazy journalism in recent weeks comes from Las Vegas where local reporters simply repeated accusations of fraud made by the Clark County clerk against ACORN without even bothering to contact ACORN to see how their drive was being managed.

The group's registration drive has reached one million voters nationwide [Full disclosure – it is run under a Joint Effort Agreement with Project Vote. –ed.] and, according to one article, election officials see “rampant fraud” in the 2,000 – 3,000 cards submitted by the group each week in Las Vegas. This week, the Associated Press reported that the state set up a “voter fraud task force” to look for “election irregularities and instances of questionable voter registration and intimidation,” directly citing issues with voter registration drives. Neither of these Nevada reports provided the facts of voter fraud, what it is and how it relates to the voter registration process. Most importantly, neither reports cite real examples of the intentional casting of an illegal ballot – the real definition of voter fraud – in the state.

However, it may be that the hard work Project Vote and others – including the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, DEMOS, and the Advancement Project - have engaged in over the past few years debunking the voter fraud myth is beginning to change the way journalists approach these stories.

This week, several publications broke this trend by debunking recent Virginia GOP allegations of widespread voter fraud as a result of massive voter registration drives that primarily target youth, low income and minority communities – constituencies that have a long history of being underrepresented on the voting rolls and in the voting booth.

Since the beginning of the year, an unprecedented 147,000 people - “almost half under the age of 25” - registered to vote in Virginia, according to Monday's Washington Post lead editorial. Pointing to a recent incident where three members of the Community Voting Project were arrested for falsifying voter registration cards, Republican Party chairman, Del. Jeffrey Frederick of Prince William County claims widespread voter fraud is a hidden agenda in voter registration drives.

Remarkably, however, this time the press decided to investigate this inflammatory accusation. This charge is “utterly baseless” and is “unsupported by election officials, police or prosecutors,” the Post notes in the editorial. In fact, the Post described the accusation as an exercise in “fear mongering” by Frederick, amplified by his allegations that citizens who register with these drives are also vulnerable to identity theft, a claim that amounts to nothing more than “a classic attempt to suppress votes,” the Post editorialized.

Bob Bauer, at his Web site, www.MoreSoftMoneyHardLaw.com, takes the critique one step further, looking at both the accusations and the Post’s coverage. “And the Post omits mention of another feature of Fredericks' suppression gambit,” wrote the election law attorney. “He also called for an 'investigation,' well understanding that his words would creep into the press on his remarks and filter out into the electorate.”

In a prime example of the kind of journalism that should happen as a matter of course when these kinds of serious allegations are made, a Virginia reporter for the Danville Register & Bee reached out to local registrars to get a real idea of the voter registration process and how unlikely it is to lead to voter fraud.

“'It's not easy to falsely register somebody,' said Pittsylvania County Registrar Jenny Saunders, who explained that in addition to the registrar going over the application for obvious errors (like missed questions), there's a statewide database all applications are checked against.”

Partisans out for political gain perpetuate fear about the integrity of the election system, something that the media often picks up unfiltered. “In fact,” the Post wrote, “it is groundless accusations and cynical fear-mongering such as Mr. Frederick's that are injecting the real venom, and the true threat, into the elections.

Below are some important facts to consider when writing (or reading) reports on voter registration fraud:

Voter Registration Drives Rev up in Presidential Election Years

The fact that young people and minorities are expanding the voting rolls this year does not indicate that something is awry with voter registration drives. Indeed, most large-scale drives target those populations least represented in the electorate. Further, in high interest election years, especially presidential, more people are motivated to help register voters or get registered themselves. Stories about so-called voter fraud should be evaluated in terms of the number of cards thought to be fraudulent versus the total number of cards the registration drive is gathering. In Virginia, a handful of fake cards were found in a drive that could register more than 30,000 people.

Voter Registration Fraud Does Not Lead to Voter Fraud

“We have the checks and balances...to makes sure the wrong person doesn't get registered and the right person does,” said Va. election official, Saunders in the Register & Bee.

Further, professionally-run drives expect almost a third of all applications to be duplicates or incomplete, no matter how well-trained the canvasser or volunteers are. This does not mean they are all illegal. However, the registrar is required to ensure all applications contain accurate information “including whether the applicant is a citizen, their Social Security number, date of birth, full name, valid residence, whether they've been convicted of a felony, or whether they have been determined mentally incapable...If any of that is left off...the application is denied,” according to the Register & Bee. Note: Not all states require Social Security number information to be filled out on a voter registration card. For more information on your state's requirements on registering to vote, visit ProjectVote.org.

Allegations of Voter Fraud are Often Motivated By Partisan Gain

“If you're not winning at the ballot box, try your chances in the registrar's office, or in court,” the Virginia Pilot editorialized. “[That's] [h]ardly democratic.”

Following the success of voter registration drives that have increased registration among low income, minority and young people, almost all claims of rampant voter fraud have come from Republican leaders, despite lack of substantiation of a real problem. The most vicious and corrupt efforts made were part of what has become the US AttorneyGate scandal that subsequently exposed the widespread politicization of the Department of Justice and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. All of that unraveled because former US Attorney David Iglesias refused to make false accusations of voter fraud against ACORN’s 2004 voter registration drive in New Mexico.

The fact is between 2002 and 2005 – when the Department of Justice carried out the most intensive investigation of voter fraud in US history – only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting nationwide. However, partisans still made public allegations and the press, in many instances, ran these claims with out real evidence. Armed with these published anecdotes and buoyed by manufactured public outcry about the possibility of their votes being canceled out by illegal voters, legislators fought to pass laws that disenfranchise certain classes of voters. As a result, states like Indiana and Georgia have implemented some of the most draconian voter ID laws despite the lack of any evidence of actual voter fraud.

Reporters practicing ethical and rigorous journalism should recognize that merely using the “rhetorical hand grenade” of voter fraud - without an explanation of how voter registration and elections are administered or an investigation into the evidence of voter fraud - is the real threat to democracy.

Quick Links:

Minnite, Lorraine. “The Politics of Voter Fraud. ”Project Vote. March 2007.

Voter Registration Guides and Surveys [By State]. Project Vote

In Other News:

A voting penalty after the penalty – Birmingham Press-RegisterAnnette McWashington Pruitt watched her 18-year-old son graduate from high school this May. She proudly tells people that he is going into the Navy, following in the footsteps of his older brother (who is serving in Iraq) and his grandfather (who was in the Air Force).

Voting Rules Create Land of Disenchantment: Advocacy groups are battling New Mexico's strict voter registration laws as election looms – Miller-McCune
Jo Ann Gutierrez-Bejar remembers volunteering for the annual voter registration drive in Albuquerque, N.M. She remembers the camaraderie as the group of usually 30 to 40 volunteers headed out in the morning, clipboards in hand, to knock on doors and register new voters.

Denogean: 97-year-old voter can't prove she's a citizen: On deathbed, father told her to vote Democratic – The Tucson Press
Shirley Freeda Preiss of Surprise is one ticked-off little old lady. And who can blame her? The 97-year-old retired schoolteacher and onetime traveling showgirl has voted in every presidential election since 1932 when she cast a ballot for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But thanks to the state's voter identification requirements, it's looking unlikely that she'll be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election.

Watch your (official) language - Stateline.org
Missouri, a key presidential swing state and home to one of the most hotly contested gubernatorial races, will test what some see as voters’ attitudes toward immigrants this November with a ballot measure to make English the only language of state government.

Keith Olbermann turned himself into a liberal journalist sometime in late-2004 after George Bush won re-election in a bitter fight for the White House (that being unless he undermined the system and cheated again). I was originally flattered by his style of journalism–which was frankly, leagues ahead of what anyone had seen on FOX News or CNN (then again, anything was better than the monotone approach of Paula Zahn and the hypocrisy, racism, sexism, and gullible approach of Bill O’Reilly)–but now I realize that Mr. Olbermann is misrepresenting the Democratic party, liberal base, and the liberal media.

He has turned what was a fact-check on the conservative media into an all-out firestorm against Mr. O’Reilly as both an individual and anchor. His refusal to end this obvious ratings-ploy that seems more like name-calling between two kindergarteners is tarnishing his reputation as a serious journalist. In the process, he is destroying his own network, MNSBC and its much more respectable parent, NBC News.

Also, his 10-minute “special comments” have transitioned from a smart, carefully-worded approach at exposing crooks and liars to an all-out attack that is baseless and undeserving. His recent special comment on Hillary Clinton’s RFK-assassination baffled me. I don’t agree with what Mrs. Clinton said, but it wasn’t newsworthy. His neverending rant didn’t focus on a particular issue, like how Katrina victims are still deprived of resources, or how the United States is going full speed ahead to the Olympics in Beijing despite China’s mistreatment of the people in Tibet and Darfur, but rather an unsignificant comment made by a candidate that was hardly worth discussing.

The liberal media’s reputation was spotless before Mr. Olbermann’s sudden transformation in late-2004. Much of it was known for quality reporting, researched content, and informative insight into the world of politics. These days, the liberal media is about attacking everyone who attacks them in sight, not coming up with solutions but rather assuming and coming to false conclusions, and not willing to compromise for the good of the people.

Isn’t that what we continue to accuse the conservative media of doing?

edit: I hope to make myself clear here. I am a DEMOCRAT. I stand for DEMOCRATS. BUT, I will speak out when one of our own misrepresents our base, our ideals, and our values. When it comes to the media, I stand for an UNBIASED media that is not opinionated on any subject. That way, we can all make our own VALID conclusions based on the FACTS.
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Shane runs the youth-based blog, The Young Democrat.

I'm guest blogging for The Nation for the next month. I'll be posting 3 - 4 posts per week, some of which will be cross-posted here.

My first piece went up today. It's a rebuttal to that Paul Maslin piece in Salon last week:

For as long as I've been involved in youth organizing (about five years now), our most difficult adversary has been the press. During the 2004 election, the media over-hyped the circus that was P. Diddy's "Vote or Die," while ignoring the real work on the ground done by groups with far less star power (and consequently a smaller draw for a rag looking to sell papers or pull in eyeballs). After the election, despite large gains made in youth turnout and participation, the media largely botched its analysis by falsely declared the youth vote – once again – little more than electoral vaporware.

It's been one of the great victories for the youth organizing community this cycle that the media narrative has finally – and surprisingly, accurately – turned in our favor. Which is why I was hugely disappointed this weekend to read a piece in Salon written by Democratic pollster and fellow Deaniac Paul Maslin that proclaimed the youth vote to be "not that big of a deal."

To be fair, Maslin gets it right when he says that youth turnout is about more than Obama. The increases we've seen are a long time in coming and are due to a confluence of factors including: the increased size and natural engagement of the Millennials generation, over four years of organizing work in the field and online to engage young voters on the part of progressive youth organizers, and a real devotion of time and campaign resources on the part of the Democratic Presidential candidates.

But Maslin gets it wrong when he tries to lay blame for Kerry's loss at the feet of young people. Voters under 30 not only increased their turnout in larger numbers than any other age demographic in 2004, they were also the only age demographic to vote for John Kerry over President Bush. Maslin's thinking is common among youth-vote critics who clutch to a nonsensical binary world-view that a friend of mine summed-up rather aptly: "Everyone expects young people to fail until they succeed, and then they didn't succeed enough."

Read the rest here.

Earlier today, the conservative Washington Times printed an op-ed by Suzanne Fields in which the author called young voters ignorant and don't understand policy or the great political debate of our time.

Kat Barr at Rock the Vote effectively demolishes the author's arguments in a response on the Rock the Vote blog:

But I'm very much going to take issue with the idea that young adults are too ignorant to grasp the big issues of the day. Given that today's 18-29 year olds are the most educated generation in American history, are reading the news at increasing levels, have access to the Internet and its vast resources in growing numbers, and are getting involved in issues and politics in ways we've not seen in decades - I'd say we're doing an OK job of being informed.

And speaking as the "young voter" (I'm 30) who wrote the post - I am well aware of the significance of the Knesset speech. I'm well aware that what happened at the Knesset was a remarkable departure from a 60-year-old standard originally agreed to by two venerable Americans, President Harry S. Truman and Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, to keep foreign policy criticisms between elected officials within our shores. As noted in a column in The Hill:

"It is a tradition for a sitting president not to confuse partisan politics with foreign policy. We can have intense debates within our borders, but we don’t carry them overseas. We especially do not air our partisanship in a politically charged atmosphere, such as the Israeli Knesset, where it may well inflame passions in the complex and dangerous environment of the Middle East. Yet that is exactly what President Bush did."

Speaking as one young(ish) voter, I can assure the columnist I get the importance of what happened last week. And I also get that foreign policy is complicated and that politics can be complicated. And I get that there are troubles in how our education system prepares us to understand these things.

Go read the whole thing.