Mike Gravel

Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine I'm starting to recover. Here's a whole bunch of stuff I missed while laid-up in bed:

• Over at It's Getting Hot in Here. Julianna Williams has an excellent run down on what has bene a busy 6 weeks in the youth climate movement. If you're looking to find out what young people have been doing to stop global warming and contribute to the international movement to halt climate change, read this piece.
• Hang around in lefty campus politics long enough, and you'll hear stories about liberal bias among professors and probably encounter the work of David Horowitz. Well, apparently unable to find any real discrimination against conservative thought on campus, one student at Princeton just decided to make some shit up, going so far as to fabricate an assault and threatening emails. Police are now investigating. You've got to admire the intellectual honesty of campus conservatives.
• Rock the Vote and AT&T have announced a plan to register 2 million young adults, in part through text messaging.
• There was an attempt in Maryland to disenfranchise (from the primary) 17 year olds who will by 18 by November 2008. Opposition from Fair Vote and both the Democratic and Republican Parties has caused the state to reverse its decision. Kat Barr at Rock the Vote Blog has the story.
• Ron Paul is encouraging Iowa students to come back to the state for the caucus, and he's putting up some of his new-found cash to help them make the trip.
• The Des Moines Register reported on the work of Rock the Caucus - a partnership of Rock the Vote, the Iowa PIRGs, and the Iowa Secretary of State's office - to prepare high school students for participation in their first caucus.
• WireTap runs down the 10 biggest victories in 2007 for youth actvists on issues ranging from climate change to Jena and college affordability.
• We're Going International. The UK's Liberal Democrat Party has hired Brian Eno to help the party reach young voters.
• The Nation ran an excellent piece about privacy and activism on Facebook.
• Finally your moment(s) of Zen via Mike Gravel's latest ads. The first mixes schoolhouse rock and 60's acid culture to create a video that is tele-tubby-esque in its mesmerizing capabilities. The second, Mike Gravel raps. 'nuf said.

Via BoingBoing - a chart comparing the issue positions of all the presidential candidates - Democrats and Republicans.

A few interesting posts from the third week of July:

• Justin Krebs of Living Liberally writes on Open Left, describing the recent reading initiative that brings together Harry Potter-lovers and social activists across the country. HP Alliance -- a group founded by 20-something Andrew Slack -- in conjunction with Genocide Intervention Network are publicizing the subtle political messages of J.K Rowling's fantastical series. With Podcasts, free concerts, and Myspace pages, HP Alliance asserts that Rowling's renowned novels actually take strong progressive stances on the injustices of tourture, the right to trial, the value of diplomacy, and the significance of racial equality and workers' rights. Slack is certain that there is power in numbers, and the large community of Harry Potter readers can do a lot to "fight...the dark arts in the real world." -- I always thought that there was an eerie resemblance between Cheney and Voldemort.
• Today marks the start of the Young Democrats convention in Dallas -- the event that Obama was criticized for not attending weeks ago. Speakers will include Gen. Wesley Clark, John Edwards, and Mike Gravel, and the convention will provide young dems with numerous training opportunities.
• The Times conceded more coverage to the Obama campaign's "innovative fundraising techniques" yesterday, in an article describing the innumerable less-than-$10 donations Obama is collecting from t-shirt and key-chain revenue. At the moment, no other campaign is known to have listed paraphernalia sales as donations. Obama's official campaign store is said to be responsible for several hundred thousand dollars of campaign contributions, and, according to David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager "still get[s] people wearing your hats and displaying your bumper stickers."
• I thought Jam Band Fan or Taliban? was funny, but recently, a newer -- and I think more subversive -- guessing game has reached the net. Name My Vote allows participants to guess peoples' political parties based solely on one photograph. I did some impressive "political profiling" and correctly matched 5 democrats and 3 republicans, but I failed to identify the independents. The game basically ends up being a more subtle version of "Hot or Not" and is an equally-guilty pleasure.
• Andrew Golis at TPM Cafe looks at Campaigns like the Bono-endorsed (RED) and asks, "what if an entire generation of youthful idealism is being channeled into conspicuous consumption?" Personally, I think, if the government fails to provide social services -- as the Bush Administration has so clearly failed -- there is nothing wrong with corporations teaming up with non-profits to fulfill that role.
• Anastasia Goodman of the Huffington Post reports on a highly-upsetting JFK School of Government study, which concluded that "28 percent of teens pay almost no attention to daily news and that an additional 32 percent are casually attentive to a single source only." This sort of political apathy is inexcusable during such an integral election year! I recently visited some of my camp friends from Connecticut -- one of whom had never heard of Barack Obama, while the other had clearly been listening to Fox News, citing Obama's madrasas experience as reason for rejecting his candidacy. I was desperately biting my tongue, trying not to ruin the weekend with political Sturm und Drang. As Goodstein writes, "It's essential that the next generation of citizens be informed and more importantly, engaged with what's going on in the world beyond their 50 friends on MySpace."
• Education and Labor Democrats have put together a video for YouTube about the recent passaage of the Cost of College Reduction Act. In the video, Joe Courtney - who was elected by 63 votes this year, riding a wave of youth support - explains the bill.

Cross posted at MyDD. Please recommend.

One of the things I want to do through the course of this primary is track the "youthroots," or "under 30" grassroots organizing on behalf of candidates - campus groups, high school groups, or other identified youth groups (like Punx for Dean in '04). I want to not only track these groups, but look at how they organize their members, how they coordinate with each other, and how they coordinate with the "official" youth operations of the campaigns. The end goal being to compare, contrast, and establish best practices for youth outreach.

As a start to that project, I've compiled a list of all the groups I could find for each candidate based on some simple Google searches (candidate name + youth, student, teen, high school), a look at the blogrolls/links, and some quick surfing on MySpace and FaceBook. I'll follow it up with emails to the administrators of all those groups and report back the results later this week along with some more thoughts as to who's youthroots are organizing most effectively and why. If you are part of - or know of - any other youthroots that I'm missing for any candidate, please add a link in the comments.

There are some preliminary thoughts based on initial observations offered throughout the post.

• If you look on the right sidebar, you’ll see a new header called 2008 Candidates on Future Majority. Clicking on each name will rearrange the content on the site so you can view all the content tagged with that particular candidate’s name. It will be up through the primaries.
• Joe Anthony responds - point by point - to Joe Rospars blog about the issue. It makes me even more sympathetic towards Anthony’s point of view. He also mentions his MySpace community explicitly as an arm of the netroots, which is pretty cool.
• The folks at Students for Gravel continue to impress me. They are running a pretty sophisticated campaign to up their candidate’s visibility online. Whether or not they have the actual number of supporters to get any traction is questionable. What’s not is that they know what they’re doing when it comes to leveraging the internet for their candidate.

Mike Gravel may be the crazy grandfather in the Democratic presidential primary, but he's also a potential rallying point for a whole bunch of folks who voted Nader in 2000 and think Kucinich is a toothless joke. He's had some solid appearances lately - particularly on the Colbert Report and during the Democratic debate, where he was a jolt of energy in an otherwise soporific event. He's also already encountering some pushback from the mainstream media and politicos, who want to exclude him from future debates - an opportunity to make hay and consolidate a (very minor) grassroots uprising if ever there was one. In short, Gravel's got nothing to lose and a lot to gain, so his campaign isn't nearly as risk averse as those of the front runners. That makes him an interesting petri dish for testing new strategies, and his supporters are rising to the challenge.

Case in point is the use of Digg by Gravel supporters and Students for Gravel. Every single blog post on the Students for Gravel site has a "Digg" button. They're using it to increase Gravel's profile online, and it's probably going to work. Gravel is dominating the 2008 elections page on Digg, and some articles about the candidate are bubbling up to the front page of the site. It helps that the Digg community is somewhat contrarian/libertarian, and very much a culture of subcultures. Gravel, as an outspoken outsider against an unpopular war is a natural candidate for a place like Digg. It probably makes it easier to move Gravel stories up the queue, but it also potentially taps into a new supporter base.

Digg is in all the major newspapers this week because of the hex key drama. Lots of new folks will be visiting the site, and tooling around. Now, maybe they'll get introduced to Mike Gravel.