Organizing for America | Students.BarackObama.com Blog Director: In case you missed it: YearlyKos

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In case you missed it: YearlyKos

By Marc R. Peters - Aug 5th, 2007 at 11:49 pm EDT

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The following post is by Jacob Alperin-Sheriff, a student at George Washington University:

Howard Dean's keynote kick-off speech at Yearly Kos made it clear that the Democratic Party and the Democratic presidential candidates are committed to focusing on the needs and issues of students and young people. The Senate's passage of the College Cost Reduction Act backs this up. The Democratic Party will not pander to youth come election time and then do nothing about their issues the rest of the year.

Given the strong focus on young people by all the presidential campaigns, why are so many of us students gravitating toward Senator Obama? The answers were revealed during the "Progressive Youth Movement" panel on Friday. Of course, the "cool" factor as a requirement for attracting youth interests was mentioned, and Obama's "rock star" status has certainly helped him a little.

However, the experience of the panelists revealed a factor that I believe is the key to Obama's vast support among young people. This finding is, "divisive politics really turns young people off." This is a marked difference from the Boomer generation, where activism thrived off of anti-establishment activities like draft riots, bashing the system, and righteous anger. As we all know, most young activists organizations are of the "get things done" persuasion.

For instance, STAND is not protesting the genocide in Darfur by staging hunger strikes, a tactic used by Boomers to protest the war in Vietnam. They're working to get their universities and their towns to divest from Sudan by meeting with school and government officials. They're working to put pressure on China and the '08 Olympics so that China stops propping up the regime. They're working to get their universities to give scholarships to bring young Darfuris here to study so they can go back and become leaders with the skills they've learned. The same thing holds for other youth progressive organizations.

This is half the secret to Barack Obama's generational appeal. Like many of us, he's staunchly progressive. His instinct is to bring people together to accomplish good things, and this meshes perfectly with most of our beliefs. The other half, of course, is that his campaign utilizes Web 2.0 technologies like social networking, blogs, and Youtube so well. The Obama for America campaign's understanding of netroots organizing was expounded upon by David Alpert of Living Liberally and by Obama staffer and veteran of the successfully Minnesota Youth Coordinated Campaign James Hannemeyer at the Technology and Politics panel.

Obama leads on reforming Washington. At YearlyKos, Obama made it clear that lobbyists have a disproportionate effect on the way Washington works. Under the old Democratic model, there are 45% of the voters who are solid Democrats, 45% who are solid Republicans, and 10% who are persuadable and all live in Ohio and Florida and those are the ones who are targeted.

Under this 50% +1 model, nothing transformative can get done, because the lobbyists in Washington can manage to scare enough Congressmen away from supporting reform measures for fear of electoral reprisal. He talked about how he's gotten 20,000 people to turn up in Atlanta, 40% of whom weren't registered to vote at the time, and how he can keep this up and make inroads in heavily under-registered states like Mississippi, with its heavily black population and young progressive population (John Kerry won young voters in Mississippi in 2004 according to exit polls).

Obama is running and will be running a 50-state campaign. Barack Obama is, in short, the candidate who will bring people together to accomplish the transformative progressive change that this nation so desperately needs.

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