Jeff Goldsmith on Lottsa Luck: Dems Spend Big to Lure Back Young Voters

This Washington Post article details a plan for the Democratic Party, sensing an onrushing catastrophe at the polls this November, to spend $50 million trying to re-energize the huge surge of young voters drawn to the polls in November, 2008 by Barack Obama. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37804806/ns/politics-washington_post

As some commentators argue in the article, this is money likely thrown down a rathole.  Those voters voted for Barack Obama in 2008, not for the Democratic Party.  What Obama represented to them (and me) was a fresh start, a break with the corrupt past, and a promise to reconnect government with real people. Unfortunately, a lot of those young voters will have spent most of Obama’s term living in their parents’ basements, looking for non-existent jobs and opportunities. 

To put it mildly, though they continue to support Obama, they are just as disillusioned with government and political institutions as everyone else.  My guess:  young people will not storm the barricades to keep their incumbent Democratic Congressmen/women in office, but rather return, chastened, to political silence.  Whether they will turn out in 2012 to put Barack Obama back into the White House is a big, open question.  

Obama was an insurgent candidate who won nomination over the Democratic party establishment.  He made most of his elders in the Democratic party (except, notably, the now late Ted Kennedy)  profoundly uncomfortable.  But circumstances conspired to prevent him from continuing his insurgency once in office.  Obama was forced to spend most of his first year and half stopping a ruinous financial panic and then cleaning up the resulting mess.  What remaining political capital he had was devoted to accomplishing “health reform”, whose real benefits lie almost three years away, inconveniently after both this and the next national election.  

Unlike John Kennedy, who continuously spoke to the young idealists during his Presidency, inspiring them to serve, Obama has been forced by economic exigency into a game of inside baseball with the very interest groups- public sector unions, the trial lawyers, financial institutions, the health system and the legions of consultants, policy entrepreneurs, lobbyists and hangers-on who swarm around government looking for handouts.  The Democratic party cries out for a thorough cleansing.  What do you think it will take to do this?   $50 million for propaganda isn’t what’s needed, but a deep and meaningful soul-searching.  Wonder if they will find one …