progressive movement

by Seth Pearce, Living Liberally

This week Living Liberally launched Praying Liberally, our new network of local liberal meetups of progressives from a wide range of faiths to talk politics, say a collective prayer for "the least of these" in our world, and build community to organize around our common causes.

Since Monday, when Praying Liberally launched over at Street Prophets and got some mention on Daily Kos and Hullabaloo, we've gotten several requests to start new chapters, many from Boomers, some who've said they felt too 'old' for the Drinking Liberally crowd, which is fine. Different Liberallies appeal different people. But we still haven't gotten any requests from millennials.

This leads us to ask: is Praying Liberally just for the Boomers? Will the religious left die out?

It doesn't have to.

With interest in religion and spirituality rising on college campuses, and the fact that the millennial generation is one of the most liberal ever, the community potential is there.

Plus, The fact is there are many progressive religious youth orgs, such as Mitzvah Corps, that get young people engaged in social justice and other progressive causes.

But unlike conservative religious youth groups, progressive ones don't usually self-identify in ways that would explicitly denote them as progressive organizations. Also, these groups haven't formed solid coalitions with the progressive movement, and in that they fail to act as a legitimate gateway for youth into the progressive movement. Introducing youth involved with religious programs into the greater movement was one of the Religious Right's key skills as they grew their power in the last decades of the 20th century.

The progressive movement needs to build connections with these progressive religious youth groups through more liberal faith communities such as the United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist and Episcopalian churches, and the Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements. As well as the younger, more liberal generation of church-goers at traditionally conservative churches.

This relationship between "Church" and Progressive Movement could provide us with great new leaders, who like Barack Obama, would come to the progressive movement through their faith community. It could also infuse these religious organizations with new energy, connecting young people to faith in new ways and expanding the opportunities offered to them by their religious community as they see their church, synagogue, mosque or temple becoming more connected with their everyday lives.

But for now, while we try to convince the progressive movement to get involved with this kind of outreach, are there any millennials out there who want to start a Praying Liberally chapter?

So here's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I think is very important. Why aren't young voters and the many youth organizations that have sprouted in the last 5 years represented at the tables of the major progressive policy coalitions?

Earlier this week, a major new progressive policy coalition announced it's launch. Health Care For American Now (HCAN) is a coalition of over 100 progressive institutions dedicated to spending over $40 million this election cycle to promote guaranteed health care for all Americans. Looking over the list of participating organizations, only one - the League of Young Voters - is an organization representing the interests of young Americans. None of the 12 members of the steering committee are committed to representing the policy interests of young people. This, despite the fact that young people are the demographic most likely to lack health insurance.

This is clearly one of the next steps that we as progressive organizers need to take. We've made great strides in moving our generation to the polls and in altering the narrative around youth engagement (though there is still much work to be done along those lines). But even as youth orgs are creating an effective infrastructure for getting out the vote and building a new leadership pipeline, we're still not a major player the realm of progressive policy. We may be more effective and coherent as a movement, but we're still relegated to the "kids table."

If you look at the recent FISA fight, youth groups are also not one of the key players. With the exception of student loans and perhaps climate change activism, I can't think of any major progressive coalition in recent years that prominently included youth organizers in its leadership (please, correct me if I'm wrong) or as a key coalition member.

It's going to be very important that we change that - particularly in '09 and '10 when we'll have our biggest change to mold more progressive policy and legislation. We're getting really good at mobilizing our members and peers to vote. It's about time we demonstrate that we can mobilize them around an issue and get our rightful seat at the table.

Harpers is running an interview with Sydney Blumenthal about his new book. During the interview, they got around to discussing the youth vote.

Shorter Blumenthal: they didn't turnout historically, probably won't this year, and if they do it won't be as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be:

4. In your analysis of the transformation of the electorate that brought the Democrats victory in 2006, you focus on the youth vote and note its sharp trajectory into the Democratic camp. Do you consider this to be a stable pillar on which to build a new Democratic majority? Young voters are not only less inclined to actually vote than other age groups, they are also famously fickle in their political attitudes. Isn’t it in fact only natural that a carefree college student will embrace liberal attitudes from which a later white-collar worker with a mortgage and children may turn?

The younger generation, responding to Bush’s radicalism, is emerging as a liberal one. Its development may be part of a natural cycle as the children of a liberal generation, just as their parents were children of the New Deal generation. Bush has been the formative experience in their political education. Yet the idea that the entrance of a new generation of young people will suddenly transform American politics is by now among the oldest, most romantic and least persuasive notions of so-called “new politics.” Proposed in the aftermath of the 1968 election, many Democrats pinned their hopes on the youth vote. That generation, my own, was and still is the largest numerically and proportionally in American history. Rather than try to analyze the internal reasons why the Democratic Party had come apart in the late 1960s, theorists suggested that a new generation would rescue the Democrats as a political deus ex machina. In a 1971 book, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s, Frederick G. Dutton, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, wrote: “Voter turnout increases with education, affluence, political awareness and social influence, and those attributes are all demonstrably higher in the coming generation than in any other new voting group in history.” This idea was one of the key underlying assumptions of the George McGovern candidacy in 1972. (McGovern, alas, lost 49 states.) A 1970 book, The New Majority, by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, describing the Republican sources of power as the “unyoung, unpoor and unblack” proved more prescient.

Voters under 30 during this campaign year have had a greater impact within Democratic primaries in terms of numbers and influence than they will in the general election. The Pew poll of May 8 now shows a growing generation gap, though “modest by the standards of the 1960s.” Yet a majority of those over 50 years old, according to Pew, do not share younger voters’ view, for example, of Barack Obama as “inspiring” or even as “patriotic.”

The “new politics” promising a youth-led renaissance, the transcendence of partisanship and the withering away of social need through the greening of America ended in tears 35 years ago. It’s a dream that apparently defies its repeated deaths.

I've got to disagree with Blumenthal. First off, the Boomers were not, contrary to popular belief, a liberal generation. Their values may have differed greatly from that of their parents, but as a generation they did not vote monolithically as we're seeing young people do today. Boomers are a split generation whose members have clashed for decades. That's what the culture war is . . .

Second, he assumes that young people today - their motivations, their engagement, the size of their generation, the mood of the electorate - are the same as back in '68 and in all those other elections when young people failed to turnout. This, fortunately, is not the case. Young voters are voting largely as a single voting block - a trend whose strength will only increase during the general election when Obama picks up Clinton's supporters. Thanks to new online tools like YouTube and FaceBook and MyBarackObama.com, engagement is easier, higher, and more effective than ever. Thanks to real field campaigns by third party groups and Students for Barack Obama, young voters are being incorporated into campaigns like we haven't seen in decades - since even before 1968, when LBJ kicked the college democrats out of the party. Obama's new 50-state voter registration plan will only amplify these trends.

Millennials are also a larger generation than the Baby Boom and this year it is highly likely that their turnout will top the record 55% set in 1972. I would argue that what we've seen in the primaries thus far isn't an outsized influence from young voters, but rather just a taste of what youth participation will be in November.

The generations are very different as well. As Strauss and Howe outlined in their work, and as Winograd and Hais just elucidated in their new book, Millennial Makeover, Boomers were an idealist generation. Their involvement in politics has been largely personal (moral), and outside the system. They rebelled against their civic-minded parents. Millennials are the opposite. they are a civic generation that prizes participation within the system and community engagement. Comparing the two generations is like apples and oranges.

Shorter me: This isn't 1968, '72, or '84. Millennials are different than their Boomer and Xer predecessors. Blumenthal's ideas are equally out of date.

Ben Smith at the Politico is now reporting what Matt Stoller blogged as rumor earlier this week: that the Obama campaign is telling progressive donors to withhold funds from "outside" 527 organizations. At this point it's inclear whether this means all 527 organizations or all just the media organizations that might run negative campaigns in the fall.

Senator Barack Obama's campaign is steering the candidate's wealthy supporters away from independent Democratic groups, calling into question what had been expected to be the groups' central role in this year's Democratic offensive against Senator John McCain.

Obama's national finance chairwoman, Chicago hotel mogul Penny Pritzker, told supporters at a national finance committee meeting in Indianapolis May 2, and in other conversations, not to give money to the groups, people familiar with her comments said.

From the perspective of the Obama campaign, this makes sense. It reinforces their message of rejecting the partisanship of the past and don't need anyone muddying their message with negative ads. They have a large enough volunteer base geographically dispersed enough to run their own 50-state field campaign (which they already launched this last weekend).

That's a short-sighted view, however. The Obama campaign isn't the end-all, be-all of progressive, or even Democratic, politics. He may well have the money and volunteers to pull this off all by himself this year, but will he do the same next year, while he's busy pushing policy and his name isn't on a single ballot? Will he lead the media and field campaigns during the 2010 midterms? What happens when Obama is no longer on the ballot? Or if Obama should become an unpopular president and can no longer muster the same forces as we're seeing now?

One of these things will eventually come pass, and when they do, we will need those "outside" organizations to step up and fill the gaps as they have these last years.

In the realm of youth organizing, there was nothing happening outside of non-partisan voter registration prior to 2003. That was rectified by the creation of numerous 527 and 501c4 organizations during the last election cycle. Presumably these, too, would be defunded if the Obama campaign has its way.

Not all campaigns, will be as successful with youth as Sen. Obama. The state parties are still quite bad at targeting young voters. We will have a hard time maximizing youth turnout without those organizations, and I worry that if these new institutions have funds withheld this year, they will wither on the vine and in a few short years we will be back where we started pre-2003.

Some might argue that Obama is posturing. That this is just a pose to maintain his post-partisan image. That all depends on how serious the donors take him and what they decide to do with their money this cycle. If donors ignore Obama's statements and give anyway, then no-harm no-foul. The article makes clear, however, that some donors are taking him seriously:

The donors have been considering entreaties from Progressive Media USA, run by conservative-journalist turned liberal media critic David Brock; from former Clinton aide John Podesta's Fund for America; and from America Votes, a group backed by billionaire George Soros that focuses on voter mobilization, among other efforts.

But in recent days, major donors have begun to conclude that Obama is serious in trying to cut off funds to the outside groups.

"It's given donors pause," said one prominent Democratic donor of Pritzker's words.

Youth organizing is supported by so few donors. Indeed, the big struggle now is to find mid-level donors to help make our new infrastructure more sustainable and less dependent on the whims of one or two funders. If even a few of these funders heed the Obama campaign's words, it could have drastic effects on the sustainability of our nascent youth movement.

I hope that doesn't happen.

It's a traditional critique of progressive youth organizing that it's been a huge mistake of the left to make only cyclical investments around elections, rather than long-term investments in leadership building and capacity. For decades, the conservative youth movement has made those non-cyclical investments in organizations like Young America's Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and many more to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year. The results of these investments over the past 30 years has been the creation of a crop of leaders like Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ralph Read and over 50,000 other activists who've run through the conservative leadership training pipeline.

Meanwhile, the left has made cyclical investments that spool up around elections, and we've also made a lot of investments in non-partisan GOTV and voter registration work. The upshot of this is that we've lacked a real leadership pipeline, but it's also meant that a lot of innovation has happened on the left around GOTV work, whereas the opposite is true in the conservative movement.

This is probably going to turn out to be a huge advantage for us in 2008. Young people are leaning heavily progressive and turning out in record numbers. This will only be helped along by a strong GOTV operation aimed at getting young people to the polls.

This isn't an argument in favor of cutting off the work that's been done investing in other areas. I still think that we need to build an infrastructure to match the conservative infrastructure, and if donors hadn't shaken off the cyclical mentality, we wouldn't have great new organizations like Campus Progress. Just saying that for once the old short-sightedness of the progressive movement builders might pay some dividends.

A number of people have gotten in touch with me about my recent post on the Maine College Democrats (pretty much all of whom told me I was off base in at least some part of my critique), so I think a follow-up is in order.

On the Video:

It's been made clear to me that this video was intended for use solely at the Maine College Democrats fall convention, and it was used as an introduction to a speech by Congressman Allen (aka white dude in the video). As such, most of my critiques were off base. It's a high-quality video, intended purely as red meat to a small and highly motivated audience. It wasn't meant to convince anyone of anything, and was the right message for its targeted audience. It was great work by the person who put it together - I should hope to see material of that quality consistently from all progressive youth organizations throughout the 2008 cycle and beyond.

On the Blogopshere

It's been made clear to me that my final paragraph seemed to come out of nowhere and make little sense. That sucks - it was a rushed post in many respects and in hindsight it would have come out very differently (or not at all). So here's some more (hopefully coherent) thoughts.

The fact that MyDD, America Blog and SenateGuru 2008 all gave props to the Maine CDA video is a good thing on the whole. It is too infrequent that young organizers get credit in the blogosphere for their good work, and in so much as the quality of this video was so high, it deserves some praise.

So why did I write what I did?

My post was an overreaction to the fact that I hold fairly low (and well known) opinions about CDA and its work. Part of that is the fault of the DNC, part is the fault of those in the leadership of the organization (and to be honest, I'm not sure how much blame to assign to each). College Democrats of America is an underfunded and opaque organization of questionable effectiveness. The fact that they are underfunded is the fault of both the DNC who controls the CDA budget and the state parties who poach funding earmarked for youth outreach and spend it on other projects. That the organization is opaque is both the fault of the leadership and the DNC press office, which keeps a tight lid on things. It's questionable effectiveness comes from a combination of all of these things.

Writing about youth organizing should be a mix of carrot and stick, just like it is for our candidates and our institutions; groups should be praised when they do good, and critiqued when they do bad. When NARAL endorsed pro-choice Republicans over Anti-choice Democrats, the blogosphere didn't sit back and applaud NARAL for promoting pro-choice values. Instead, it was quick to point out the flaws of its strategy in achieving its long term goals. The blogosphere should turn the same critical eye to the work of youth organizations.

I often find it frustrating that within the blogosphere (and all media, really) youth organizing frequently gets boiled down to "college" (even though only 1/5 of 18 - 29 year olds currently attend a college or university). There are many more youth organizations out there than those that work on campuses, and much of the work in turning out more young voters in recent years has focused off campus as much as (if not more than) on. Our understanding of "youth activism" (our = the blogosphere and the media) needs to expand beyond what happens on college campuses just as much as it needs to move beyond the apathy narrative.

I confess, that it also irked me that so much praise (front page coverage on MyDD, America Blog and SenateGuru 2008 is nothing to sneeze at, and many organizations would love to have such coverage) went to something that at the end of the day was really so small - a promotional video meant to be viewed by only a handful of college students in one of the least populated states in the country.

That said, this was clearly the wrong time for me to pick this particular fight. My beef with CDA and the blogosphere's coverage of youth organizing are all separate issues, and I did a disservice to them all when I hurriedly conflated them in my posting. I'm mindful of the benefits of establishing a positive feedback loop between the blogs and youth organizers. CDA did a good job here and I shouldn't begrudge them some deserved praise.

Mostly this blog covers domestic issues, but it is worth noting that the trends we are seeing here in the United States among Millennials - higher voting rates and civic mindedness - are not just American occurrences. Check out this story from the International Herald Tribune on young people in Poland who have boostrapped their own "Rock the Vote" youth campaign into existence:

The latest opinion polls show Civic Platform, a free-market, pro-European rival party, poised to win the election Sunday. But polls here have proved highly unreliable, skewed by the country's historically lethargic turnout, which was a little over 40 percent in the elections two years ago.

Young Internet-savvy Poles are fighting that lethargy, and at the same time the image of their country as populated by angry old villagers rather than the urbane hipsters and flush young businesspeople who can be found in cafés and clubs around the nation's booming capital.

Just as we're seeing here in the states, this was a completely volunteer campaign, bootstrapped into existence by young people working with zero budget. Now it's starting to make waves:

Dwurnik's posters brought her to the attention of the young women behind the Web site Wyberiam.pl , the word means "to choose" in Polish. They asked her to design "I voted" buttons for their campaign, which is run out of the basement of Chlodna 25, a smoky café and bar where they share space in the basement with DJ parties.

Wyberiam's organizers said it operates on essentially no budget. They were making the buttons themselves with an old hand-operated machine. They rely on donated services, whether that means printing their fliers or airtime for their televised advertisements with celebrities asking people to vote.

Kasia Szajewska, one of the group's founders, said it was surprisingly easy to persuade the Polish MTV channel to run their ads. "In the States you have Rock the Vote. They're really happy to have something similar," she said.

These kids are smart and savvy. Not only are their PSA's airing on the local MTV, they're also using text messaging to drive up interest and turn out the youth vote:

WARSAW: The text message spread with viral speed among the cellphones of Polish youths. With national parliamentary elections coming up Sunday, kids had a clear mission: "Steal your grandmother's ID," the text jokingly implored.

It referred to the conventional wisdom here that conservative older women put the ruling Law and Justice Party and the Kaczynski brothers - the famous twins with the round faces of aging cherubs who are prime minister and president - into office. Without their identity cards, the grandmothers would not be able to vote. If granny does not vote, the government could be driven from office.

Teenagers guffawed. The governing party fumed.

The most amazing part - it looks like it worked. The Polish election was held earlier today and turnout reached 55% - up from 40% two years ago. No word yet as to whether or not increased youth turnout drove that rise, but it seems likely.

Alex at The Seminal takes issue with my "drooling economium" over Nicholas Handler's essay on the current meaning of college. His critique is short, so I'll reprint it here:

And to conclude, Mike Connery over at Future Majority has a drooling encomium of a piece by Yale student Nicholas Handler entitled The Post-Everything Generation. The gist of this thing is that college kids nowadays aren’t like the “radicals” of the 60’s. They are the generation of the postmodern, the “open book” that rejects the “dogmatism” of modernism and the expected revolution that never came for their parents. Our activism is supposed to be one of the “rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change…”

I think Handler’s fool of shit. Our generation has only inherited the theory of the 60’s, the same postmodern tripe that didn’t call for changes at the point of production and real changes regarding oppression, be racial, gender, or on any other front. No, the 60’s and us as its ideological inheritors have only been concerned with changing the “spectacle” of society, rejecting the “mainstream” culture and adopting our own to “subvert” it, as if some subjective rearrangement of the semiotic chairs could seriously “affect change” on the sinking ship of oppressive institutions. I recommend a perusal of Heath & Potter’s The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. While I don’t agree with all their points, it raises a lot of good questions about the effectiveness of what Connery calls the “New College Experience” and its predecessors.

I think Alex missed the point, or at least we have very different readings of Handler's essay. Alex lumps myself and Handler in with the "predecessors," which is shorthand for 60's radicals and theorists, but that misses the point. We're talking about a rejection of those groups. I don't want to "semiotically rearrange the deckchairs" anymore than he does, and I assume the same is true for Handler. We are rejecting so much of the past - that rebelliousness and college as an "incubator of radical change" - precisely because we recognize how coopted and inneffective it is for actually accomplishing real, fundamental change.

Instead, we're talking about a generation dedicated to new institution building. Working precisely within the economic and political systems that govern us to effect change. That's what I see when I talk about a [dot]Org Boom in youth organizating, initiated and run by our own generation. That's what I see Handler referencing using the short hand of "MoveOn.org." That's what Rick Perlstein observed in his conversations with kids interested in corporate social responsibility in his essay, which kicked-off the contest.

My familiarity with postmodern and Marxist theory is admittedly 6 years rusty, and I haven't read The Rebel Sell, but I think Alex is misreading Handler, and I wonder how different our opinions of this really are.

Update II: Matt makes a fair point in the comments that I've misquoted him, conflating a number of bad votes into "MoveOn." He's right, though I still think my point holds. Even on all those war issues, YDA is fundamentally not a single issue advocacy group, they exist to see progress on a wide variety of issues as well as perform GOTV and build local Democratic infrastructure.

Update: Over at the YDA blog, Cani has posted some of the overwhelmingly postive feedback they have received from their members.
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At Open Left, Matt Stoller is picking a fight with the Young Democrats. At issue is a letter sent by YDA to its membership, thanking the Democratic Congress for achieving progress on many issues of concern to young voters (as cataloged in a report by Speaker Pelosi). Stoller's issue is that the letter was sent at the same time that the Democratic Senate was Sista-Soujaing MoveOn (and by proxy, the anti-war movement) for an ad it published leading up to testimony by General Petraeus.

Stoller's beef is that this demonstrates a lack of coherent strategy on the part of YDA, and that their "letter to congress" represents an unhealthily sycophantic allegiance to the Democratic Party. In a pretty over-the-top move, he's calling for their funding to get cut. That's a huge overreaction and Stoller's argument is narrow in that it is limited to this one event and misses the fact that, while many YDA members are against the war, YDA as an organization has different goals and objectives that only partially overlap with those of MoveOn.

The Young Democrats main objective is not to carry water for MoveOn, but rather to engage young people in Democratic politics, keep those members excited and engaged, and to push the Democratic Party to pay attention to young people. This has been unphill battle for YDA, and for many youth institutions. It's hip and popular to talk about the power of Millennials and the civic engagement of young voters these days, but even a year ago most Democratic Party insiders were extremely skeptical as to the value and reliability of the youth vote. Despite our contributions and gains in 2006, that is still the case in some areas where YDA chapters fight with the local parties.

Earlier today, I spoke with Tony Cani, the Political Director for the Young Democrats. Cani acknowledged that the lack of progress on the war is disappointing, but, given the mission of the Young Democrats, it was important to send a message to their members about the many positive policy outcomes of their work (in helping elect a Democratic congress, and in particular on the Cost of College Reduction Act). The fact that the Speaker's report specifically targeted young voters was in itself a big victory for those who are organizing Millennials on behalf of the Democratic Party, and one that can serve as a strong motivational tool for members of the Young Democrats who will be out walking canvasses, making phone calls, and pulling levers at the Ballot box for Demcorats in 2008. These are important developments if your goal is to strengthen the power of young people within the Democratic Party.

That said, YDA made a communications gaffe here. I don't want to deny or minimize that. This was a strategic error in so far as YDA should be on board with the progressive movement, and supporting MoveOn should be a no-brainer for an organization whose constituency is vehemently anti-war. But this incident is part of a larger problem: There is very little cross over and coordination between the netroots and progressive youth institutions. Not just on the war, but in general. This lack of coordination is the real concern here, and we're not going to make any headway on it by having the blogosphere muttering "damn those idiot kids" or by pulling funding from a youth organization that has done excellent work in turning out young voters and raising the profile of youth within the Democratic Party establishment, has made huge strides in building infrastructure for young people in Democratic politics across the country, and begun to revive what was long a stagnant and moribund brand among young people.

Right now, we in the blogosphere shouldn't be pointing fingers, but rather asking ourselves why so few young people participate in our online discussions and why this gap exists between progressive youth institutions and the netroots.

Right now, youth are clamoring for change in Washington and flocking to the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yet very few of these young progressives seem to realize or care that such a movement for change began years ago precisely with the rise of MoveOn and the Netroots. Why? One reason might be tone and tactics - young voters today, while they support Democrats by large margins, are tired of partisanship, and the blogs are engaged in partisan bloodsport with the GOP and recalcitrant Democrats like those who voted against MoveOn. In contrast, Obama's "post-partisan" rhetoric appeals deeply to Millennials and they would rather throw their weight behind that effort than throw their lot in with the bloggers. Another reason, suggested by Cani during our conversation, is that the blogosphere itself, despite its open forums, may till be too linear a medium for a demographic that prefers much more open and social forms of online communication.

Whatever the reason, both sides need to do a better job reaching out and coordinating with one another. Bloggers like Stoller and others who are nodes in the netroots communications network should be asking how they can make sure that groups like the Young Democrats are on message next time something like the MoveOn resolution fight emerges. And groups like YDA need to do a much better job of monitoring what's going on with the netroots on a wide variety of issues, not just the war, and connecting their members to that activism. If we are not all talking to one another, there's very little chance that our message will be strategically coordinated.

The today's Chicago Tribune is running an in-depth look at the Obama policy team today, leading with the observation that a not-insubstantial portion of campaign's advisors are old-hands from the Clinton Administration. That would seem to run counter to the campaigns' rhetoric that Obama brings change and an outsider perspective.

Barack Obama's presidential bid may have a well-cultivated insurgent feel, as the candidate both benefits and suffers politically from a relatively thin record of experience in Washington.

But the swelling team of policy advisers who have joined his campaign shows a politician grounded in his party's intellectual mainstream and well-connected within the capital's Democratic establishment.

Now, I believe that young voters are intelligent and informed, but I don't expect that they are also policy wonks. Knowing who's on a candidate's policy team is pretty esoteric stuff, even for the most hard core political junkie or activist. But I have to ask, would Obama's young supporters even care about this if they knew? I don't think so.

Young voters are progressive. Of that, there is no doubt (just look at my post from this weekend if you need a refresher). But just how progressive are they, and how is that manifesting itself in this election cycle? How deep are those commitments and what is required of candidates to meet them?

Recently, Young Voter Strategies released new polling data (pdf) noting that Barack Obama was the #1 choice of 33% of 18-29 year olds in the Democratic primary. Yet when 2nd and 1st choices were tallied, the more centrist (and certainly inside-the-beltway) Hillary Clinton surged into the lead among young voters, with 48% of the vote compared to Obama's 43%. Now, this is a bit of a leap since we don't know from what candidates Clinton and Obama are pulling their second-tier support, but if almost half of all young voters are happy with a Clinton nomination as their second choice, it doesn't seem to far fetched to concluded that young supporters wouldn't much care that Obama has built a centrist and even somewhat entrenched policy apparatus stocked with ex-Clintonites.

There are likely a number of factors at play here. I don't think you can discount the fact that both Obama and Clinton would break significant glass ceilings. This country is still really racist and sexist. It might very well be that having a black man or a woman be president is significant enough in and of itself to satisfy the desire for change among large swaths of the youth electorate. That both candidates are Democrats who are likely to significantly shift American policy also helps, but the degree to which that policy is shifted doesn't seem to matter. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that Dodd and Edwards, two of the more progressive candidates in the race who are taken seriously by the media and the political class (sorry Kucinich), get almost no support as first choice candidates from young voters.

So just how progressive are young voters? In poll after poll, they are supportive of Democratic policies, but maybe that is not a commitment that extends all the way down to the nitty gritty at the policy level. In a two-party system, you only get an either/or choice, and when it comes down to brass tacks, the policies of the major Democratic candidates are very similar compared to the GOP alternative. All are promising some form of universal health care coverage, better environmental stewardship, a restoration of civil liberties, and a significant draw-down in troops levels in Iraq. Perhaps a shift in power from one party to another, and a shattered glass ceiling that has long held back sidelined groups like African Americans and women, is enough change to satisfy the Millennial voter.