Nancy Boyda

In an interesting development, one of the only four losing democratic incumbent congressional races in the country is speaking out. Second Congressional District Rep. Nancy Boyda's campaign manager Chad Manspeaker has posted a blog on the Kansas blog Everyday Citizen calling for a greater need for youth outreach and leadership development for youth in the state.

After a tough year in Kansas that made only a net gain of one state house seat and lost a US Congressional seat, democrats in Kansas are bitter sweet. Inspiration for hometown favorite Barack Obama came out in force with a gain of 4% over Kerry's loss in Kansas in 2004. Obama also garnered a 65,000 vote gain since 2004. Yet even with those benefits, Kansas was unable to create any local benefits for itself.

This morning's Topeka Capitol Journal says democrats in the state have no bench of candidates ready to step up and run for any statewide seats much less to seriously oppose the now 3 members of Congress in Kansas.

Manspeaker acknowledges his loss in his blog and the further loss of the state, but calls on Kansas Democrats to instead re-invent their party as a tech savvy grassroots movement much like what the Obama campaign did that does youth outreach and develops young leaders presumably to become candidates in the future.

More than anything, I learned from this campaign that grassroots organizing really does get the job done and new technologies like social networking tools are presenting themselves to make organizing forward even more efficient and effective.

If we are going to change Kansas politics, we must start from the bottom up, not from the top down. Utilizing social networks to build our ground forces and recruit new people will put us in a position to go after local races, could you imagine a city council race with social networking? But we can't stop there. We must build a structure that is more vast than the small races and act as a support mechanism for every race. We must build leadership within our state and retain those young leaders and fostering their enthusiasm. We must be a presence not merely for those who voted Tuesday, but those who will cast ballots in the years to come.

This campaign taught me that if someone has never been forced to run a campaign, no one will know who they really are. It is our job in the coming days, weeks, and months to change the rules and fight to expose people for who they are and what is really behind them. "The true test of our strength is how we rise to master challenges like these when they do arrive."

Emphasis mine.

Larry Lessig is well known as a brilliant legal mind and nerd extraordinaire, but his recently posted Ted Talks video showed me a side to him I was excited to see.

Larry has our backs.

After explaining to the older leaning Ted audience what a mashup or remix was and showing some of my favorite examples, Lessig explains to them

"In my view the most significant thing to recognize about what this internet is its opportunity to revive the "read/write" culture..... digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal cords ... user generated content spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these (shows logos of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc..). Celebrating amateur culture - by which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they are doing and not for the money.

I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time. For what (John Phillip) Sousa romanticized when seeing the young people circled together singing songs, its what your kids are doing right now. Taking the old songs and remixing them to make them something different. Its how they understand access to this culture."

He goes on to talk about these technologies not being new, these are things that film producers have been able to do for years but it is the democratization of this technique.

"Anyone with a $1500 computer who can take sounds and images from around us and use them to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. This is how they think. It is what your kids are. As they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationships to themselves." (emphasis added)

Lessig then goes on to explore the assault on creative culture with the "right vs. wrong" world of copywright laws, piracy, and the youth lead underground.

This lecture is particularly interesting given the NYTimes article about Ron Paul today about online (and also youth support) that people find so shocking. Here is a HUGE participatory campaign that has translated online action to blink and bank.

Contrasted - and on the same day - that the Clinton Campaign insults young people and Facebook users for not wearing 3 piece establishment suits and being old.

" At least two of Hillary Clinton's upper-echelon advisers, Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn, were decidedly unimpressed. "Our people look like caucus-goers," Grunwald said, "and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook." Penn added, "Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state."

I don't think I'm alone in my age group looking for jobs where I can wear sandals and t-shirts to work. Ten bucks says this is one of the major reasons that there is a massive anti-Hillary facebook group.

Not to mention Karl Rove and Max Cleland who spoke at a conferences on the Rise of Citizen 2.0.

"He (Rove) argued that the Netroots have been largely ineffective and said MoveOn.org’s inability to end the war proves his point."

"Cleland also lamented the abundance of vulgar words on blogs and expressed shock when a friend shared with him my favorite YouTube video. The blogosphere, he said, is "out of control" and "ain't gonna win undecided voters" even though it may be responsible for increases in youth voter turnout."

I'm sure there is a George Allen, Hillary Clinton, and Karl Rove walk into an internet cafe joke to be made here somewhere. Of course, she's only recently become youth friendly. Though only technically. Perhaps, she'll learn better soon.

I think the character of campaigns like Ron Paul, Howard Dean, Webb, Tester, and others compared to very establishment, message controlled, topdown campaign- web 2.0 (aka youthy stuff) might be a necessary quality. If you're an establishment candidate like Clinton and you've already declared yourself as the winner then there is no need for any kind of outside of the box thinking. I think John Kerry would disagree (though not until after November 2004). But if you're opposing these types of candidates you can't win unless you create a backdoor, under the radar, campaign... Just ask Nancy Boyda.

Those, most often, are fueled by the enthusiasm of youth and the young at heart who are utilizing the technologies that CNN posts each night.

I hate to tell Sen. Clinton or Karl Rove this... but this is the future, this is the generation of your children, and until you embrace it you'll continue to only pull votes from the older crowds which will grow older and older as you yourselves do until eventually your own support will appear in history books rather in the tracking polls you'd like to see it in.

After the repeated attacks on bloggers that we’ve seen on FoxNews shown to us on BraveNewFilms and what they’ve spent the week leading up to YearlyKos talking about on O’Reily (which I’ve been subject to by some nutbar who changes the station at my gym).

I’ve also been watching something else going on all week. Something very contradictory the “Liberal Bloggers” and “Liberal Media” accusations that Bill and his buddies at Fox seem to throw around so freely.

There has been some talk around here about the value of Howard’s 50 State Strategy that gets candidates to run in all offices

“Not only is this the best way of distributing the party’s message, but it ensures the engagement of the youth that is so vital to the party’s long-term health and vitality.” Says Craig a poster on FM. “People that want to write off the South or any other part of this country bother me. By doing this, we’re telling young people to stay at home, sit on their rear ends, and allow the government to do whatever it wants. By doing this, we validate apathy.”

I couldn’t agree more. I am on vacation this week back to the homeland to visit family and friends for my birthday week – yes it’s a whole week – and it prompted me to really think about how things have changed in terms of the way we do outreach with Dean’s 50 State Strategy, how effective it is, and how it impacts the up and coming voters.

When I heard about the difficulties facing the Obama Campaign and their MySpace page it reminded me of an article I read last cycle about Phil Angelides and HIS MySpace page.

“Phil Angelides, California’s Democratic candidate for governor, had nothing to do with creating a MySpace page under his name. His teenage daughter was the first to point out his presence on the popular online hangout.

But rather than kill a volunteer’s unauthorized efforts, the campaign has embraced the youth-heavy site, using Angelides’ personal profile page to post position papers and other announcements. It also scans the comments section to gauge what’s on youths’ minds, turning it into an informal focus group.

“We’ve come to embrace it as our own,” campaign spokesman Brian Brokaw said. “It can help you reach an audience that otherwise might be more difficult to reach. Not as many young voters watch the evening news.”USA Today

When we talk about the youth movement in America and ways to get us to engage and participate in the process we often find a huge amount of ambiguity – little hard data/evidence (except the Harvard Institute of Politics or the CIRCLE research) and even fewer willing to conduct experiments into microtargeting the 18-30 demographic.

A few months ago I read a great article that talked about microtargeting Labor Supporters in California. Seems the California Labor Federation was beginning to notice that the stereo-types about supportive labor voters were no longer true. Because the world has evolved – not all labor supporters live in urban areas. Some now living in outer lying surburbes or even rural counties. The CLF’s Chair Art Pulaski decided to look outside the box:

“The shifting demographics of the country mean you have to look for them in non-traditional ways and sometimes in unexpected places…

Traditional targeting has always told us to focus on union members and their families in big cities, and that’s where most labor resources went for persuasion and GOTV efforts in years past. But it’s important not to build a targeting model for today’s voters based on outdated demographic patterns. Understanding that pro-labor voters aren’t just urban union members and their families anymore, we at Winning Directions worked with the CLF team to help find California’s pro-labor voters, wherever they live.”