Rapid Response

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.

Just an FYI, the reason there is not yet a response to the Washington Post editorial about Obama posted here or on other sites is that the Washington Post demands that all letters to the editor or op-ed submissions be original and exclusive. Posting here or elsewhere would disqualify them from consideration. So unilt WaPo takes a pass, we've got to keep our writing under wraps.

However, I did write an essay for Powell's Books about a month and a half ago that made a very similar argument to the one I made in my Letter to the Editor. You can read it here.

An Op-Ed published yesterday in the Washington Post got the youth vote story completely wrong.

In addition to conveniently skipping over the last 7 years in youth organizing (the piece skips from 2000 straight to Iowa 2008), it gets a number of facts wrong and mostly traffics in old stereotypes from the 1990s.

I know that Rock the Vote, which bears the brunt of the author's criticism, is preparing a response, and I'm going to be writing a full response as well that addresses the factual errors and omissions in full. In the interest of timely rapid response, though, I just submitted a letter to the editor.

In the meantime, it looks like WireTap is live with the first response.

Regular readers know that we don't like Tom Friedman around here, mostly for reasons well-stated here. He has regularly criticized young people for not taking action on the issues of the day, typically defining action as "yelling and screaming on campus quads with witty signage." So I was surprised to read his column on climate change in this weekend's edition of the New York Times.

Last week, I also met with two groups of M.I.T. students who blew me away. One was the M.I.T. Energy Club, which was founded in 2004 by a few grad students discussing energy over beers at a campus bar. Today it has 600-plus members who have put on scores of events focused on building energy expertise among M.I.T. students and faculty, and “fact-based analysis,” including a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Then I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

Shocking as it is, Friedman is giving props to young people for organizing effectively around the issue of climate change on the campus of MIT. Not by waving signs, but by building shit that actually prevents global warming. Either Friedman is slowly learning two things that we all know already - that activism can be a cultural and social experience, and that young people today are pragmatic and working within and through institutions to accomplish change that his generation has thus far been unwilling to make - or he is somehow managing to keep his head from exploding from the cognitive dissonance of his two world views.

Rob Anderson, the editor of Campus Progress has an editorial in today's Washington Post responding to an earlier editorial by author and activist Naomi Wolf:

In Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, Naomi Wolf argued that most young people today don't understand how democracy works and that even those who do are too cynical to get involved in our country's democratic process.

We'd all have something to worry about if Wolf's argument were true. America's youth today are coming of age at a time when one group of extremists has launched a violent attack on liberal values abroad, and as another seeks to roll back our civil liberties at home.

Fortunately, Wolf's depiction of my generation is supported only by anecdotal evidence, off-topic research and a faulty analysis of recent history. In reality, we young Americans are reshaping the political landscape with our activism and innovation. And we're working to increase our influence on the issues we care about most.

Two things. First, to Ms. Wolf: Fact Check; There Is No Crisis among American Youth, as Rob Anderson ably demonstrates in his piece.

Second, I just want to note that there has been a lot of really great push-back from progressive youth organizers against misleading and downright inaccurate narratives in the press about American youth participation in politics. Between the retorts to Adam Nagourney's reporting, corrections to a piece by CBS, smackdowns to 60 Minutes, reactions to Courtney Martin's piece in the American Prospect, rebuttals to Tom Freidmans' condescending and hypocritical "Generation Q," the creation of the Journalist "Cheat Sheet," and now this, it seems like progressive youth organizers are getting their sea legs when it comes to engaging in rapid response. The narrative is already much improved over what we saw around this time in 2003 or even 2005, and after the caucuses we'll have a big chance to reshape it even more. Until then, it's good to see such strong pushback. It's likely priming the pump for better coverage as we get deeper into the election cycle.

The Wired blog Threat Level is reporting that there has been a huge response to Thomas Freidman's Generation Q column that Alice covered here yesterday. The cognitive dissonance may kill Freidman. How in the world could apathetic, quiet Generation Q folks rise up so quickly to organize against him? And we even did it without starting a Facebook group!