Author: Will Holmes
On Monday, Sept. 15, an article written by Professor of Politics and Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program Peter Dreier, entitled “Obama’s Youth Movement,” was published on the website of political commentary magazine The Nation. Within 12 hours of its publication, the article received 18,000 hits and generated considerable buzz on The Nation’s online forums.
For over a century, The Nation, a self-proclaimed “flagship of the left,” has been at the forefront of political liberalism in the United States. The weekly publication serves as an appropriate venue for Dreier’s article, aimed at young liberals looking to involve themselves in the grassroots politics popularized by Obama’s innovative Democratic primary campaign.
Dreier writes that the coming presidential election will likely be defined by an unprecedented surge of young votes.”The youth vote will be highly influential this year,” Dreier writes. “My goal is to help young people from around the country shape today’s politics.”
Dreier reports that during the 2008 Democratic primary, 4.8 million people between the ages of 18-29 cast their ballots, quadrupling the 1.1 million mark set during the primaries of 2004.
Dreier’s piece covers this remarkable political change and also provides information for students looking to make a real political and social impact. Dreier cites numerous youth activism groups, such as Rock the Vote, the Campus Vote Initiative and the United States Student Association as launching pads for politically interested students.
Many of these groups utilize online networking tools such as Myspace and Facebook to create massive networks of young voters, and are laying the groundwork to significantly increase voter turnout among young people. Together, “these groups represent a potentially powerful, somewhat overlapping, crazy quilt of organizations,” writes Dreier.
Dreier also cites Occidental’s own “Campaign Semester,” a program in which students receive a full semester of course credit working full-time with a Senate or Presidential campaign for ten weeks.
Expecting to receive only two or three applications from “ambitious political science majors” for a spot in the program, Dreier was surprised to receive 19 applications from students representing a variety of disciplines, all of whom are currently spending the semester in eight electoral “battleground states.”After election day on Nov. 4, participating students will return to Occidental for a five week reading and research course.Following the success of “Obama’s Youth Movement,” Dreier was contacted by the New York Times and National Public Radio to compose similar pieces.
So far in the 2008 race to the White House, young voters have proven themselves to be a significant demographic. “Indeed, for many college students and post-college 20-somethings,” Dreier writes, “the Obama crusade has reached a ‘drop-out-of-school’ or ‘quit-my-job’ level of excitement.”
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