Filed a piece on the youth vote last night for style="font-weight:bold;">Morphizm pals
WireTap/Alternet, which focused on everyone's favorite demographic -- the kids! -- and analyzed their astouding levels of participation and commitment in the 2006 midterms. The data is seriously telling, and the analysis of that data leaves one without too much in the way of illusion. Which is another way of saying that those who continue to blather on about how the center took this election can't read numbers worth a damn and have been puffing too long on the crack pipe called wishful thinking. Sift this!
href="http://www.wiretapmag.org/activism/42848" target="blank">The
Kids are Right"The youth turnout rate -- which started at 24 percent -- will
probably rise after scandals dissipate or are probed to satisfaction.
In 36 precincts heavy with youth voters, according to the Center for
Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a
highly respected youth voter clearinghouse and research organization,
voter turnout was six times the national average. That's called
walking the walk. Add it up, as the Violent Femmes once screamed, and
you have change blowing in the wind and everyone smelling it at the
same time. After all, in two years, these voters will be older and
even more experienced, and they're not likely to change their
political tune, and not simply because thousands of them may still be
in Iraq, occupying another country for the sake of an American
regime's stubborn ignorance. High school and college students, who
have to do homework from hell to get ahead these days, will remember
well enough that former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith claimed
the president didn't even know there were two major sects of Islam at
work in Iraq, just months before the President ordered troops to bomb
the life, liberty and happiness out of it. Considering the hideous
price tag, in lives and dollars, it's hard for people who actually do
homework to stomach the fact that their president cannot, even as he
sends them off to die...."href="http://www.wiretapmag.org/activism/42848" target="blank">READ
THE REST HERE
Like it or not, progressives are beginning to take over the
government, and it will only be a matter of years -- barring something
unforseen like, oh, another war? -- before they are a political
majority in the country. What the entire United States, not just us
treehuggers, has realized is that years of reactionary social and
policy measures implemented by the so-called Republican majority has
taken us nowhere but backwards. So far, in fact, that there is no more
room to move at all, only inch along the massive wall that the Repubs
have tried to build around the country and their leaking ideology.
But the youth vote's power does not stop there. Republican and
Democratic pollsters and strategists have agreed, following the
midterm ass-kicking, that neither of them can win a lick without
winning the youth vote. As the youth vote goes, especially when they
vote in these numbers, so goes the country. Why? Because they're only
getting older, and according to the data, 75 percent of voters who
stick with one party over the course of three elections usually end up
staying with that party for life. Ironies of ironies, considering the
Republicans consider themselves the pro-life party.
Without the youth vote in hand, they were taken off of life support in
the 2006 midterms. And so will the Democrats, should they choose to
look the gift this of remarkably organized, relentlessly active
demographic in the mouth and fail to accomplish the very things they
were put back into power to accomplish. I've always talked mad trash
against both parties, so don't expect me to get cuddly with the
Democrats until they show me what they can, or are willing, to do. I
would suggest everyone else do the same.