Kind of awesome...

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I'm so sorry to do this in a diary....

If you are a Pennsylvania resident reading this (and you have not already registered to vote), please register now at: http://www.dos.state.pa.us/voting/cwp/vi ew.asp?a=1192&q=442984.

At that site, there is an 'onscreen voter registration' link so that you can immediately register to vote.

REGISTER NOW.

The deadline is 3/24/08!!

Thank you.

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Over the weekend, Biden and Richardson announced that they do not support the right of Iowa students from out of state to caucus.  Dodd has had four different positions in the span of as many days.  The Clinton campaign seemed to retract her earlier comments and then notsomuch.

What is so shocking is that so few in the Democratic Party establishment and no one else in the Democratic primary field has weighed in on behalf of the utterly unproblematic, long-held progressive position that students have every right, and should be strongly encouraged, to register to vote.  How hard can this be?

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As Mike Connery suggested Saturday, Obama's strongest demographic across the early primary states, contrary to conventional wisdom, doesn't seem to be Millenials (ages 18-29) but rather Generation Xers (polled most commonly as 30-39 or 30-44).

These voters were born between 1963 and 1977, meaning they largely missed the 1960's, and turned eighteen and began to vote between the mid 1980's and the early 1990's.  Though technically still barely a late Boomer, Obama, born in 1961, turned eighteen in 1979 --- just before the beginning of the Reagan era.

October's Iowa Rasmussen poll, despite showing a twelve-point overall lead for Clinton, showed nearly a ten-point lead for Obama among voters aged 30-39.  In Rasmussen's South Carolina poll, Obama trailed by thirteen points overall but held a twenty-point lead among voters aged 30-39.  The same holds true in New Hampshire.  (See graphs and specifics here.)  Indeed, it's the only age group Obama wins consistently.

All of the usual qualifiers apply of course.  These crosstabs tend to change a lot.  There's a startling incongruity between the poll numbers thus far and everyone's impression of widespread enthusiasm for Obama among young people.  

This may be a matter of Obama's support being especially strong among college students and less so among youth voters generally.  But there isn't solid evidence for this, as 18-25 year olds, let alone 18-21 year olds seem to be rarely polled.  Two recent polls conducted by journalism students at Brown and NYU showed twenty-point leads on campus for Obama.

In a new article for The Nation, Lakshmi Chaudhry makes a more fundamental argument about Obama's candidacy, irrespective of polling.  Chaudhry notes that Obama used the word "generation" thirteen times in his announcement speech in Springfield, but curiously rarely references his own generation (Xers).  

Obama more often addresses himself to students:

He often speaks to the Millennials, recently telling cheering college kids in South Carolina, "It's your generation's turn." But rarely mentioned is Obama's own generation, i.e., Generation X, the Lost Generation, whose name has been virtually erased from the national conversation.

Obama's addressing students makes more sense if you recognize that Obama is a former college professor --- the only candidate to my knowledge who has been a teacher --- and that his wife Michelle was the founding director of Public Allies, a non-profit that trains young leaders for public service, as well as founder of the University of Chicago Community Service Center, which operates a summer training and internship program for thirty students every summer.  Students for Barack Obama was also founded eight months before Obama even announced his candidacy for president.

Also, Obama's message of ending the culture war has special resonance among young people.  Why?  As Paul Waldman wrote in The American Prospect today, "it isn't just that young people take the progressive side in the culture war; for them the war is over." As polling shows:

[Young people] don't wonder whether gay people should have equal rights, or whether women deserve the same opportunities as men. In their world, interracial dating is no longer controversial.

I would bet, though I don't have the poll data to prove it, that young people, unable to remember the civil rights movement, are more likely to believe in the possibility of an African-American being elected president.

Generation Xers, on the other hand, are somewhat invisible when it comes to media coverage.  Even though, as Chaudhry points out in The Nation:

The irony is that X-ers -- a sociocultural label typically used to describe those born between 1961 and 1976 -- have become invisible at a time when they are changing the face of politics.

Chaudhry makes the case that thirty-somethings are actually at the core of the revolution of progressivism in the Democratic Party.  His examples include our very own Jerome Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas, and Batista Schlesinger of the Drum Major Institute.

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Cross-posted from the Rock the Vote Blog

The media has been touting the phenomenal growth of Stephen Colbert's Facebook group, which was created by high school student Raj Vachhani after Colbert announced his plan to run for president in South Carolina. In a mere eight days the group boasted a million members, and is currently shooting above 1.2 million.

Aside from an amazing membership count, this pop culture phenomenon has made a real political impact: more than 4,300 members have registered to vote via the group since Vachhani added a link to Rock the Vote on Thursday night (Oct. 24). That's about one registration per minute.

In fact, Rock the Vote's online registration capability is open to everyone. Sign up for a free account to track voter registrations through your own blog or website. We'll generate an embeddable registration form (aka "widget") that you can customize with a logo, and you'll even have access to the list of people you register so you can remind them to vote on Election Day.

Sound cool? Try it out. We would love to hear your feedback, too. Of course, you can always post a simple link to our online registration page if you prefer.

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