When my 19-year old daughter said she wanted to come with me to the NDN Conference held in Washington over the past two days, I got excited about the “bonding” potential for us. Little did I know that she would be the most important person there. Not her personally, but what she represents: the Millennial Generation.

Presidential-year voting among 18- to 29-year-olds grew to 52% in the 2004 presidential election. And in the 10 most contested states, voters in the 18-29-year old bracket (which includes Millennials and a year’s worth of Gen X voters) 64% turned out, according to Pete Leyden of the New Politics Institute in remarks made at the NDN Conference. Leyden said that if the electoral vote of only young Americans were counted, Kerry would have won the 2004 electoral vote by 375 to 163. What makes this so compelling is that the Millennial Generation is as large as the Boomer Generation and represents a quarter of the nation’s people. Its sheer size will make it a player in the politics of the future.

The good news for progressives is that Millennials are more engaged in the political process than Gen Xers and more progressive in outlook, according to a study commissioned by the New Politics Institute, which is affiliated with NDN. The study differentiates among 13-28 year old Millennials (Teens, Transitionals and Cusps) and finds some distinctions. The Teens (13-17-year olds) are less tolerant of gay marriage and abortion than their older peers and more skeptical of the political process. But they share with 18-28-year olds a progressive attitude about the government’s role in leveling the economic playing field, making higher education affordable and environmental protection. The older Millennials more often identify themselves as Democrats or progressives than they do Republicans or even Independents. And today, only 40% of them are even eligible to vote. In a word, they represent potential.

William Strauss of LifeCourse Associates said Millennials are receptive to the notion of “the common good” and that it’s important when developing progressive political strategy to “look at the world through their eyes.” Those eyes increasingly belong to minorities. Thirty-eight percent of Millennials are second generation Americans, mostly Asians and Hispanics.

The importance of the Millennial Generation to the progressive movement then begs the question: How do we harness that potential? With the trends in our favor, we’ll still need to market candidates to them. The good news is it may cost less.

Speakers at the NDN convention said most politicians — especially Democrats — fear innovation and therefore continue to invest in inefficient and expensive ad buys for television spots. Part of the reason is that Democratic consultants get paid through commissions on such buys. “The consultant class of the Democratic Party are no longer interested in winning elections,” said NDN President Simon Rosenberg. “They’re interested in getting rich.” That echoes the thesis of Joe Klein’s book, Politics Lost. “The baby boom generation has proved a fairly significant trough in the history of American political leadership; our greatest gift — our only — contribution to the Republic has been the rise of the political consultancy.”

Instead of consultants, argued former Dean campaign manger Joe Trippi, candidates need to hire “19-year old mentors.” He argued that they know how to get to their peers. In fact, the “user-generated content” that is currently in vogue among internet entrepreneurs should be tested in political campaigns. Millennials don’t’ watch as much television as baby boomers (my 17-year old son is an obvious anomaly). But they surf the net almost continually, and their link to the world is their cell phone.

Cell phone usage is skyrocketing, and according to presentations at the NDN conference, it is highest among minority youth. And according to Congressman Arthur Davis (D-Ala.), black males 18-25 in his state vote 20% less frequently than white youth. Meanwhile, one application of cell phones most popular among younger voters is text messaging.

Only one-third of U.S. cellphone owners use text messages — a practice immensely popular in Europe and Asia. Two-thirds of cellphone owners between ages 18 and 29 send text messages — one of many areas where young adults have a more versatile approach to the devices.

More than half, 55%, of young adults take still pictures with their phones; 47% play games and 28% use the Internet, according to the poll of more than 1,200 cellphone users.

And overall, there were 9.8 billion text messages sent in December 2005, a 109% increase from December 2004. I started out paying for 250 text messages a month for each of my three kids, but soon had to migrate to a plan that offers somewhere around 3 million messages a month. So it seems logical that Democrats need to develop text messaging initiatives to reach these potential voters.

Cell phones offer maybe the most important but certainly not the only avenue to the Millennial vote. Appearances on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, email campaigns, My Space and Facebook initiatives and college meet-ups should be part of the mix.

After the conference, my daughter introduced herself to Rosenbergl asking how she could help. Maybe she should instead offer to be Jim Webb’s 19-year old mentor.

I’ve asked this question before in a similar context, but it bears being asked again, especially in the light of two recent stories. In an AP story yesterday, the reporter seems to think “liberals” want us out of Iraq immediately.

On the issue of Iraq, [Sen. Hillary] Clinton has been buffeted by competing forces within her party. Many elements of the party’s liberal base want an immediate or timed withdrawal of troops from Iraq, while others feel such a position may weaken the party’s electoral chances this year and in 2008.

…Last week, many in the audience of a more liberal group http://home.ourfuture.org/ booed Clinton when she said she opposed setting a fixed date for troop withdrawal.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s article yesterday again paints “liberals” as the ones wanting us out of Iraq.

Liberals wanted a firm date for troop withdrawals, but others argued for a more moderate approach that would urge, but not compel, Bush to start a drawdown this year. Efforts to reconcile the two camps failed, resulting in the competing measures that were voted on yesterday.

I consider myself a proud liberal, though I like many others have been using the term “progressive” because I think it’s more accurate: I believe in making progress toward a more cooperative, compassionate society that demands both individual and societal responsibility rather than the “live-and-let-live” idea that the word “liberal” connotes. But I oppose setting a public deadline at which time we pull out troops from Iraq. For all the opposition I had before the war, broadcasting a near-term date for withdrawal is unwise, in my opinion. I think the president should say that he’s given the Iraqis clear goals on troop training, governmental progress, etc. that he’ll adhere to, and publicly say that our commitment in Iraq is not open-ended. Does that make me a “moderate”?

And what’s a conservative on this issue? Conservatives have historically shied away from foreign entanglements. And with the war’s decreasing popularity, at what point do those “staying the course” become “extremists,” defined as someone who takes a position farthest from the center?

Finally, at the NDN conference I attended the past two days (more on that later), virtually everyone used the word “progressive.” Even the group that booed Hillary Clinton for her stance on Iraq, uses “progressives” on its web site, instead of “liberal.”

With the media so willing to use the conservatives’ term “death tax” to describe the inheritance tax., why can’t they use the term “progressive” for our side?

Posting has been light today as I’m at the NDN Annual Meeting. I’ll say hello to Mark Warner for you. He was due to kick off the conference at noon today. We’ll see if he gets a better reception than some gave him at YearlyKos.

David Broder’s column today focuses on the two new Democratic publications launched this week, Democratic Strategist and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Not surprisingly, Broder thinks the first Strategist articles are short on data points to back up their assertions. Broder loves to allude to studies that often lead him to write op-eds that are basically, “on one hand, but on the other hand” thumbsuckers.

There’s a disconnect between the guidelines the Strategist posts for contributing writers and the series of articles in its first issue. But I lean toward less poll driven articles and more creative thinking.

Sometimes I wonder how Thomas Jefferson could have written the Declaration of Independence and James Madison the Constitution without testing their ideas through polling.

Northern Virginia Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to take advantage of the momentum attributed by many to a demographic shift in Fairfax and Loudoun, where increasingly urbanizing neighborhoods have leaned Democratic in recent elections.

Efforts are underway to draft state and local candidates, Northern Virginia Democrats say.

“Every Republican in Northern Virginia can expect vigorous competition,” said Gerald E. Connolly (D), chairman of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors.

Vigorous, as in waving of hands and beating of breasts? Let’s see if the Dems can really draft some top-notch candidates.

Democrat Senators Carl Levin (Mich.) and John Kerry (Mass.) have competing resolutions on Iraq, but neither has apparently taken the Political Communications 101 course.

“Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run — that’s their phrase,” he told Don Imus. “My plan is not cut and run. Their plan is lie and die.”

“The wording is very clear: It’s not a cut-and-run strategy,” Levin protested. “Our amendment is not in any sense a cut-and-run amendment.”

Never, ever repeat your opponents’ charges. It only reinforces them.

Looks like the Greensboro News-Record reported who thought she spoke for all Greensboro when she told Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, “We love you” didn’t speak for, well, her editor, for one.

Nancy’s closing comment to Rice — “We love you here in Greensboro” –was inappropriate, to say the least, and she shouldn’t have said it. She knows it, too. She told me that her mouth outran her brain and that she intended to convey respect for Rice’s accomplishments. Didn’t come out that way. And while it wasn’t meant as a political endorsement, I can see how it will be read that way. To avoid any perception of preferential treatment, Nancy won’t be covering stories about Rice or the State Department.

Will Marshall argues that instead of bashing conservatives, Democrats should “Raid the Red Zone,” which is the title of his article in the premiere issue of The Democratic Strategist. With the GOP collapsing due to its own ineptitude, now is the time.

How to seize the opportunity? There are basically two choices. One, favored by many liberals and lefty bloggers, sees partisan belligerence as the key to mobilizing a Democratic majority. The idea is that by intensifying attacks on our opponents, we can galvanize the party faithful while also projecting the strength of conviction that swing voters have supposedly found lacking among Democrats.

But this approach is based more on wishful thinking than rigorous electoral analysis. The party’s core problem is not a pandemic of cowardice among its leaders, it is that there are not enough Democratic voters. Since the late 1990s, Democrats have been stuck at about 48 percent of the vote in national elections. Moreover, polarizing the electorate along ideological lines plays into Karl Rove’s hands because conservatives outnumber liberals three to two. Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.

To successfully raid the political red zone – the South, Mountain West, Great Plains and lower Midwest – Democrats instead need a politics of persuasion. It starts by acknowledging that moderates and independents have substantive reasons for swinging Republican in recent elections, including persistent doubts about Democrats on security, taxes and the role of government, as well as moral questions.

We start by addressing the moral issue head on. We need to acknowledge that there are moral problems. Many corporations are corrupt. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Millions of children live with only one parent. These are moral issues. And our media and public discourse is, well, course.

…[C]consider the proliferating number of alternative platforms for foul language and coarse content: video games played on Xboxes and GameCubes and PlayStations; music downloaded to iPods and other MP3 players; and — most vexing of all — the array of opportunities for mischief on the Internet, from click-to-view pornography to chat rooms to social-networking sites.

All of which adds up to a need for a national discussion about solutions — what part legislative or regulatory, what part old-fashioned parenting combined with 21st-century techno-savvy?

I’ve maintained for some time that Democrats need to take on Hollywood. Anyone has the right to produce misogynist music, salacious sitcoms and morally relativistic reality shows. And the industries that make money off them have a right to do so. But that doesn’t make it right. And it doesn’t excuse Democrats from bowing at Hollywood’s altar with their hands out.

Marshall cites the work of Barbara Whitehead, the Co-Director of the National Marriage Project.

Parents have a beef with the popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages. To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents’ beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on parents’ side.

Marshall continues.

Whitehead advises Democrats to begin simply by honoring the vital work parents do in teaching their kids right from wrong. We should also equip parents with better tools to shield their kids from the onslaught of the consumer culture and aggressive corporate marketing campaigns. And there is no good reason for progressives to exempt the entertainment industry from the same kind of accountability we demand from corporations in general (emphasis added).

V-Chips and web blocking software only go so far. Clamp down hard enough on your kids at home and guess what? They hang out at their friends’ homes. You can’t shield kids from media’s blasts. But you can demand accountability and boycott the business that advertise alongside questionable programming.

There is also a belief shared at least by some of the participants [of the NDN Annual Conference] that Democrats have ridden for too long on what are the fumes of the New Deal and the Great Society, which sustained Democrats for half a century.

Amen. Dan Balz writes about two new Democratic publications — The Democratic Strategist I cited in yesterday’s post and The Democracy Journal, which appears at first blush to focus more on policy than political strategy.

Those in the middle of these [two publication launches] share a similar conviction, which is that for too long Republicans have been winning the battle of ideas (and often campaign strategy) in American politics, in part because conservatives invested in what is now a well-funded infrastructure of organizations that have produced ideas, thinkers, publications, strategists, and politicians who now control the White House, Congress and increasingly the federal judiciary.

…[Democracy Journal Co-Editor Kenneth] Baer offered a sharper critique of the politicians, criticizing as poll-driven and uninspired the 2006 campaign agenda issued by congressional Democrats. “You could go through it line by line and write the poll questions that generated each line,” he said.

One concern I have about The Democratic Strategist is found on its “Write for Us” page.

The first three types of “categories of material will particularly be sought:”
· New opinion polls and analyses
· Strategy papers based on opinion data
· Surveys and reviews of the available data and current strategic debates in specific topic areas

Are all of our ideas to be driven by polls?

Ricky sinks, while Georgie skyrockets (from 30 to 34%)