Young Voters: Democratic Party Better on National Security

While it should not surprise the most intense political observers, the Republican Party has lost the faith of young voters in yet another category.

A National Journal piece this weekend analyzes poll data from a Democracy Corps survey conducted from May 10-May 12.

The poll’s central finding is that in the wake of President Obama’s election, the traditional Republican advantage on national security issues has evaporated. Asked May 10-12 which party is better at handling “national security,” 43 percent of respondents said Republican and 41 percent said Democratic — a statistical tie.

That contrasts with the 14-point advantage (49 percent to 35 percent) that Republicans held last August in a Greenberg-Rosner poll, and the 29-point edge (54 percent to 25 percent) that they held six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, the latest survey indicates that Democrats now hold sizable leads over Republicans on several components of national security, such as diplomacy. Asked which party is superior at “improving global respect for America,” respondents gave Democrats a whopping 36-point edge. On “working with our allies around the world,” Democrats ended up with a 27-point margin.

The new Democracy Corps poll also found that Democrats hold advantages — albeit slimmer ones — on the questions of which party would do a better job with “the situation in Afghanistan” (12 percentage points) and “the situation in Iraq” (10 points).

While the GOP still has a decent foothold among youth with regard to national security issues, currently statistically tied with Democrats, their disadvantage is clear. Their huge momentum loss from 2003 to now has to be depressing in its own right, but on top of that, the Millennial worldview has changed. Millennial views of national security are steeped in multilateralism, with diplomacy at the forefront. And as indicated in the excerpt above, Democrats dominate similarly-focused survey categories.

This has to be encouraging news to the Truman Project, an organization that trains progressive youth to lead on matters of national security. On its website, the Truman Project notes that it has trained youth who have now gone on to positions of importance, such as military leaders, campaign advisers, and congressional staffers.

Thanks to its hard work, the Truman Project and other organizations targeting progressive youth have assisted in developing a generation of Millennial activists creating positive change. As a consequence, the Republican Party is contracting with no apparent clue of how to stop it.

Youth and Food Policy

Cassandra Leveille wrote a nice piece that was published the other day on Campus Progress’s site. The piece focused on the link between declining health among low-income neighborhoods and the lack of healthy and organic foods available in those areas.

Leveille explains throughout the piece that, whereas many supermarkets carrying the fresh produce — the most nutritious food in the store — are exclusively located in suburbs thanks to the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s, those trapped in poverty in urban areas are forced to rely on convenience stores overflowing with fatty, over-processed alternatives. And because of their lack of resources, many impoverished shoppers are trapped in the cycle of buying these foods, because it is the only option (other than simply not eating). In other words, living paycheck to paycheck usually means a diet of frozen dinners, Twinkies, and dollar menus at fast food joints for youth.

Leveille examines the roots of the problem from a policy perspective:

For many, the Obama administration offers hope for changing the massive amount of unhealthy foods Americans are exposed to. However, our current food agenda is largely out of Obama’s hands, by policy set forth in the 2007 Farm Bill.

The Farm Bill legislation is amended every five years and largely determines what products are available for Americans on a mass scale. The original farm bills produced during the Great Depression paid farmers to not overproduce their crops, but the current farm bills promote overproduction of subsidized foods, such as corn. The five foods that receive the highest subsidies are soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton and rice. These products appear in abundance on our supermarket shelves, often in the form of highly processed foods.

A piece in The American Prospect commented on the 2007 version of the Farm Bill, particularly the ramifications of overproducing the main five crops cited by Leveille — not just leading to a lack of diversity in food choices, but threatening the small farmers who simply can’t compete with the extremely low prices caused by overproduction.

Subsidies are marketed as an important protection for America’s food-production system and a necessary support for hard-working farmers who maintain our rural heritage. But most beneficiaries are not part of that pastoral tradition, and artificially low prices have devastated many small farmers. Since 1948 the number of farms has dropped from 5.8 to 2.1 million, and the number of farmers who actually benefit from subsidies is even smaller — a mere ten percent of farms receive 74 percent of the subsidies. Smaller farms do receive some money, but it’s hardly on par with what becomes agribusiness profit. In many ways, this consolidation is caused by the very subsidies that claim to protect the traditional farmer.

Furthermore, only five crops (corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice) receive more than 90 percent of the allotted funds. And because the subsidies are crop-specific, crop diversity decreases. Banks are less inclined to lend to farmers who want to plant non-subsidized crops, as there’s no guaranteed return. Thus, more farmers plant more corn or soy, which escalates overproduction and reduces the safeguards that a diverse crop load provides.

Leveille’s piece does a good job of pulling together the economics, public health issues, and agriculture policy involved in this matter. Leveille suggests a combination of new zoning laws, which serve to keep unhealthy fast food options out of low-income neighborhoods (already either being pursued or passed by city governments in New York and Los Angeles) with improved agriculture policy, which subsidizes more fruit and vegetables over the traditional crops listed above. Certainly the big five will continue to be the most popular, but I agree with Leveille that policy should create more of a demand for produce than it currently does. I endorse all of these actions.

However, our responsibilities don’t stop there. Our youth are being poisoned thanks to the policies we have set forth. School lunches are little more than the “drunk food” on which many college students snack — chicken nuggets, french fries, etc. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, explains why:

But [Vilsack] has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, they’re the way to—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.

So after the adjusted subsidies that Leveille advocates produce more fruits and vegetables, we should be getting those into the School Lunch program and avoiding the stale, corn-laden taco shell filled with the 20/80 ground beef most kids are eating. Perhaps we should also manufacture some creative signage to place on our cafeteria’s serveries that inform students in an understandable, fun way what they are eating.

Food is such an important part of the lives of young people. Of course, they need it to survive in the short-term, but it also forms the foundation of many of their daily schedules. The importance of nutrition, then, should be that much more apparent. In addition to doing a better job of educating our students on the foods/drinks they eat, we should also be keeping an eye on agriculture/food policy which is the driving force for many of our public health and economic problems today. While it would seem that those worse off would be afforded more of the resources needed to get to a better place instead of less, that’s not what’s happening now. As DeNeen Brown put it in a story for the Post earlier this month on the poor, “You have to be rich to be poor.” It’s up to us to change that.

Will the GOP Learn from MTV?

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais have an interesting post up at their blog, Millennial Makeover. Winograd and Hais argue that MTV is finally understanding that the youth of today look and act nothing like the youth of yesteryear, er- 1981.

The network, long known for cynical and vapid content, has suddenly understood the importance of being earnest. Booze and bikinis are out. Do-good singers and hard-working art students are in.

MTV acknowledged that its programming had become out of step with the progressive, service-oriented values of today’s youth, the Millennial Generation. “It was very clear we were at one of those transformational moments, when this new generation of Millennials [born between 1982 and 2003] were demanding a new MTV,” a channel executive explained.

Winograd and Hais examine the differences between the Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials through the lens of movies that were popular during the time period in which each generation came of age. (The Devil Wears Prada is a far cry from The Graduate.)

The point Winograd and Hais make and that I’ve echoed for a few months now is that the Republican Party won’t have a presence in national politics for decades to come unless it stops seeing youth as inconsequential and unworthy of a long-term investment; such a view restricts the GOP from understanding the general attitudes and values inherent in Millennials, who will continue to deliver a major shock to the political process over the next twenty years. And while this GOP extinction might seem great for progressive activists like us, a lack of Republican competition would actually relieve the pressure on Democrats to continue funding and supporting innovative youth outreach programs well into the future.

New York Times Plagiarizing Bloggers

Maureen Dowd is in some trouble today. In her column today, there’s a passage that appears to have been lifted from Josh Marshall’s post on Thursday, May 14th, at his blog, Talking Points Memo.

From Dowd’s column (5-17-2009): “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

(Since editors have changed the column, here is an image of the original, thanks to the blogger who broke this story).

From Marshall’s post (5-14-2009): “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Dowd’s explanation thus far is that while talking to a friend about the column in question on Friday, the friend suggested that Dowd insert the idea represented in this particular passage into her column. Dowd claims ignorance, pointing out that she had no clue her friend was giving her intellectual material belonging to someone else. Yet somehow this “weaving” of information, as she describes it, ends up in the Grey Lady word for word.

This is a big moment. It’s the old establishment versus the new order. The tale of an institutionalized pundit, who once kickstarted a plagiarism controversy herself two decades ago, producing content that, at the very least, is inspired by some dude named Josh Marshall.

The way many traditional media types view bloggers, I’m sure the verdict here will be that Mr. Marshall should have known all along that Ms. Dowd would want to use those twenty-eight words in a row and should have stopped himself from publishing that post.

Change.org Launches Jobs for Change

Change.org recently announced its new Jobs for Change initiative, linking those wishing to pursue careers in change-making with available positions in organizations serving the common good.

Over the past few months President Obama has inspired a renewed interest in public service, providing a historic opportunity to mobilize a new generation of Americans to address the major social and environmental problems we face.

Yet there are few resources connecting people interested in social change with careers in service, threatening to limit the potential impact of this new civic spirit. We aim to change that.

We are currently building the largest database of nonprofit, government, and social enterprise jobs on the web and have just hired a team of career advisors to provide daily advice and guidance to help people of all backgrounds find and develop a career in social change. We have also partnered with more than a dozen leading organizations that will give Jobs for Change reach to millions of people interested in deeper civic engagement.

While those observing the trend toward public sector jobs among youth usually focus on the success of programs like Teach for America and City Year, this initiative will fill a large hole enabling one-stop career shopping for youth already involved in creating positive change. Many more organizations will now be in the spotlight thanks to this tool, and as a result, the millennial mobilization will be strengthened.

What I especially like about this site is the extra stuff. Along with the job postings, Jobs for Change offers “Career Advisors,” who are assigned to various areas/aspects of the job search process, such as college students and AmeriCorps. In addition, young job-seekers are able to ask questions to their peers regarding change-making careers. Finally, content offering tips for young job-seekers is regularly published on the site.

A variety of organizations have teamed up with change.org to provide our progressive youth movement with an excellent resource. Kudos to everyone involved.

Establishing a Better Dialogue

If we’re really going to get things done in this country, fixing the huge problems we all face, we need to improve the conversation.

The first example comes from something Republican Rep. Pete Sessions (TX) said in an interview published in today’s New York Times.

In an interview published this morning in The New York Times, Sessions pointed to rising unemployment and said that the Obama administration was deliberately trying to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices.”

Sessions told the paper that this was part of an agenda on Obama’s part that is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

The problem I have with Sessions’ statement is its supposition that President Obama wants to hurt America and its values. When I think back to President Bush’s two terms, I can’t recall anyone on the left speculating that he was purposely hurting America because he wished its demise. It was just bad policy that hurt millions of people in one way or another. The attacks got personal many a time, and that’s something I’ll address in a bit. But bottom line — there’s certainly a difference between statements like Sessions’ above and what the left said about Bush the past eight years. I’ll coyly wonder what the difference is between Bush and Obama. Yes, they have different policies and they have/are taken/taking the country in two different directions, but there’s nothing that’s been done under Obama that would make one think that he wants to destroy the country.

This kind of statement is illogical and it debases the conversation, contaminating it so that the actual problems we’re facing can’t be discussed civilly and logically.

And I’m not limiting the scope of my criticism to the right. I’m not a fan of Wanda Sykes comments either about Rush Limbaugh’s addiction to oxycontin. It’s a personal attack on someone one doesn’t need to attack personally in order to prove their politics aren’t right for the country. The attacks are all the media can focus on when the conversation gets personal, and so, again, our problem-solving efforts aren’t helped.

We definitely need a better dialogue in this country. I think our political environment since Obama’s election has improved, but in order to move forward and make a good-faith effort to quell the nasty partisanship we’ve seen the past few decades, the dialogue should stay away from illogical attacks and get back to focusing on solving the problems threatening the common good.

Party-Building and Youth: GOP is Lost, Serves as Reminder to Progressives

I’ve gotten into a rut of writing about the GOP over the past few weeks, and I promise I’ll end it soon. But bear with me for one more post please.

Columnist David Hawpe from the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky examines youth involvement in politics within the state and concludes that youth do have an important role to play in today’s politics. Hawpe refreshingly declines to follow other lazy pundits, who assert that today’s youth are lazy because they’re not chaining themselves to bulldozers or protesting; instead, Hawpe sees the ballot box as just as effective (maybe more) than the obstructive tactics of the 1960s. Hawpe closes by hoping young Kentucky voters play a significant, responsible role in deciding Kentucky’s 2010 Senate race as young Americans did in 2008’s presidential/congressional elections. Hawpe simply believes elections need youth involvement.

Hawpe seems to focus solely on youth voting in his piece, but there are obviously several other ways for young people to get involved in politics. Registering to vote and casting a ballot is one way, but others include working on a political campaign or running one yourself. Sarah Burris at Future Majority wrote a post in January about the number of young, progressive candidates running for office this spring. While we face our challenges in getting our party to respond to requests for more youth involvement, we’re in relatively good shape compared to the other party.

A blog post on Newsday’s online editorial page notes one large problem surfacing in the New York GOP (other than the shocking defeat of Republican Jim Tedesco by Democrat Scott Murphy in a notoriously red district): no young candidates.

The party’s age problem has been evident for years. As this New York Times story points out, 15 of the 32 Republican senators were 65 or older in the last election, in November. That, of course, was the election that flipped Senate control to the Democrats, with the loss of Caesar Trunzo’s South Shore seat. Trunzo was 81 at the time, and victor Brian X. Foley was 50.

Of course, many of the retirements and defections that were anticipated after the GOP lost the majority have not taken place. Sen. Owen Johnson, 79, of West Babylon, is still in office, as is Sen. William Larkin Jr., 80, who represents the mid-Hudson Valley. Younger senators who were thought to have ambitions elsewhere — Sens. Chuck Fuschillo, 48, and Kemp Hannon, 63 — have not left, either, in spite of the significant downsize in their roles as minority members.

[...]

…You have to wonder what it takes to win as a Republican these days. There doesn’t seem to be a new generation of young candidates lining up to find out.

The Republicans, already more politically irrelevant than they’ve been in quite some time, are also missing a political farm team — young reserves who get trained locally in electoral politics before being dispatched in larger, more widely covered races. An Iowa State professor uses another analogy:

“Young people are the new trees in the deforested Republican party, and they have to plant new trees and water them and get them going, and I don’t think they’re doing a very good job with it,” says Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University in Ames.

The rebuildtheparty.com website that was created immediately following Obama’s win last November also observed a large problem with the lack of youthful candidates on the GOP bench. The group found it to be a problem serious enough to warrant a new program aimed at recruiting younger candidates in local races.

Undoing the damage to our party’s brand among America’s youth will take more than new slogans and hip spokespeople. It will mean making young voters the face of the Republican Party, and not just another target group with its own bulleted list of “outreach” talking points. To that end, the next Chairman should commit to a simple goal: working towards a Republican Party where at least 40% of our challenger and open seat candidates for Congress are under 40. Such a party will send a signal to all Americans that the GOP is once again the party of the future.

It all sounds good. But one has to question this group’s sincerity in its efforts to overhaul the party after a trip to its website. On the front page, a Tedisco campaign YouTube video is prominently displayed informing visitors the campaign “needs [their] help to win on March 31st.” More than a month later, with the GOP still unable to find its youth magic after Tedisco, 58, lost to the Democrats’ 39 year old candidate, perhaps even rebuildtheparty.com is on a furlough.

Or perhaps a little birdie told them of Michael Steele’s answer when asked to name four rising stars under the age of fifty within the Republican Party. Just a warning — it’s ugly:

“I’d say certainly Bobby Jindal, Governor Sanford, Pawlenty, Palin,” Steele said Sunday. “We have a whole host of folks out there who are beginning to emerge on the scene and will over the next couple of years I think redefine this party in a way that will be very good for us long term.”

[...]

The RNC chair was specifically asked to name three Republian [sic] leaders under the age of 50 whom he sees as “new faces.”

He ended up providing four names, all of them governors.

With that view, so much for 40 under 40.

While the Republicans are having all sorts of problems supporting their youth and/or finding any to run for office on their behalf (aside from Aaron Schock, the 27 year old congressman), there are some concerns on the Democratic side we shouldn’t ignore. For instance, Tony Cani from SEIU (formerly the Political Director of the Young Democrats) tweeted today from a youth panel at the Tennessee Democratic Party’s Summit that young candidates aren’t necessarily open to engaging youth.

tcani: Youth panel talking about fustration w young candidates in tn (ford) running from youth not engaging them. #tndpsummit

In addition to maximizing our political strength among youth, more funding of the progressive youth movement is needed, especially now that Obama won and a sense of urgency may unfortunately be lost on some donors. In addition, as Sarah noted in her post I referenced earlier, we can’t let local elections slip by after larger ones without doing our best to help our own progressive candidates. While this might be easy to do simply because the Republicans aren’t sure what they’re doing with youth, in order to build for the long-term, we must do more to extend our focus on youth candidates to every office/seat possible, no matter how small.

In the end, Hawpe is, of course, correct — youth involvement is a must in assessing the long-term health of a political party and is quite potent when given a chance. Unfortunately for conservative youth, the GOP can’t seem to make up its mind about the importance of youth participation. Even Steele, who was elected to shake up the party’s image among moderates and youth, had to rely on names like Palin and Jindal when asked for examples of rising stars. Democrats and the left, on the other hand, should use this as a reminder of the importance of continued organization and funding of progressive youth, many of whom will form the bench of candidates responsible for sustaining our majority well into the future.

Citizenship and the Purpose of Education

As we move down the road toward big change in our energy and healthcare policies, there is an increasing number of calls for change in our education system. And I’m not referring to the cliched change we hear from every politician running for an office. I’m talking about actual, systemic change that many might consider radical.

Harry C. Boyte from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship, housed in the university’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, wrote a post on Wednesday which referenced a few other works that, one by one, challenged integral parts of our education system, including our core philosophy as a country. Boyte rightly laments the increased specialization of our education system, in which students, once pursuing what they wish to pursue, are trained to silo themselves off from the rest of the academy. Boyte wants to return to “civic education.”

How do we develop citizens and citizen leaders who work with others to solve problems and build a flourishing democratic society? This question, the heart of civic education, was once at the center of American schooling, from kindergarten through higher education. In recent decades it has been increasingly neglected. We are faced with the challenge of breaking out of gated communities of our minds and work identities that are as sharply drawn as those of our neighborhoods. In recent months, a growing number of leaders in higher education have called for far ranging change in our institutions to address this.

One of the pieces Boyte uses to support his argument is written by Mark Taylor, the chair of the religion department at Columbia University. Taylor trashes today’s system of higher education in the United States, noting that the gap between today’s academic specialists and the tools and knowledge needed to solve our largest problems is expanding at an alarming rate. Taylor calls for tenure to be abolished and for an end to the organization of academia by discipline. Instead, Taylor believes that we should produce a list of problems to conquer. Not afraid of generalities, Taylor offers his own example of a list: “Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.” Taylor envisions these problems as opportunities forcing academic disciplines to converge and use their special knowledge in collaborative actions as opposed to exclusive ones.

The reason I like this idea so much is why Boyte seems to dig it. Our capacity for solving large problems in this country is diluted because of the deterioration of civic thought. Developing citizenship and citizen leaders, as Boyte labels it above, seems to have flown under the radar of those formulating the curriculum and solidifying the structure of American education. Months into Obama’s presidency, buzz surrounds the importance of service-learning and political engagement in the media. Fortunately, there are examples of the service piece of citizenship being taught and practiced within the classroom. But unfortunately, you’ll notice that many of the examples journalists use of young people engaging in political activity cite college students who had to take time off school in order to participate. Young people had to be politically involved despite their education. Furthermore, there’s a missed opportunity when service is not connected to politics: to serve is a political act. What’s needed is the solidification of a link between education and patriotism/citizenship: to be educated is to be a problem-solver. This is why Barack Obama’s line comparing dropping out of school to dropping out on one’s country in his joint congressional speech in February was both effective and encouraging. By dropping out, someone is resigning themselves to allowing problems to overwhelm the country.

Education should be seen for what it is — a public good. Education is not merely our supertrain to be used to catch up with China and India. Before we even entertain the thought of that, perhaps we need to know who we are as a people and how we can use the knowledge we gain to solve the gargantuan problems we face. Those designing our education system would be well-served to keep JFK’s advice in their heads — the education system should help us recognize and pursue what we can do for our country. It’s common sense, but that is the change in higher education we need to see.