A Reason To Believe America Will Make It

Watching the Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs and hearing the attacks on Obama for "playing the race card" by urging his original coalition to vote makes me think the mid-term elections will be chaos. I also feel that conventional wisdom will be wrong. We've heard the drill--mid-terms the President's party lose significant seats; the American people are outraged at Washington; and the economy will hurt the Democrats. Of course, this all may be true if the Democrats were running against a normal political party. Anti-gay and anti-enviromental moves in Virginia have triggered mobilization of the Democrats and an anti-immigration law has put Latino support for Democrats over the moon.



Let's talk about conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is defined by the last remains of the silent generation, the baby-boomers and Generation X. By class, these people are the types covered in the recent American Express luxury consumer poll where the average annual income was $575,000 per family. That's several times mine and over 12 times the average American. Washington conventional wisdom is even more confined to super wealthy people who dine out with each other.



So conventional wisdom also believes these cohorts are the center of the universe and the people who actually determine elections--whether by their voting numbers or by their media influence. So by their calculations, minorities--blacks and Latinos don't vote and youth will never come out for mid-terms. What seems to validate their case were the governors' elections in New Jersey and Virginia--where we have seen the disasterous results.



During the last Democratic primaries, Nate Silver wrote extensively about the difficulties with polling minorities and polling young voters, since the later all have cellphones. He always warned that the polls at that time underpresented these groups, particularly the young. And he pointed out that these people were the Obama surge voters, who blew by the opposition within the last week of the campaign. But these surge voters have to be organized and mobilized to vote. As we saw in the Virginia race there was no effort to reach these voters by the Deeds campaign.



Last night I read a diary posted on the Dailykos by a millenial(a member of those between 18-24), who claimed they were the last minority and were going to mobilize. I call these people the Digital Generation after the studies by Don Tapscott. This generation is committed to change through democratic means, are very environmentally concerned, are non-racist and are non-homophobic. A large percentage come from an ethnically or racially mixed background. They also come from homes where they have experienced different parents. My sons' friends insisted on meeting my wife and I because my son was the only one of his cohort raised by the same parents all his life.



Today, the economy has hit millenials sometimes worse than minorities. They experience unemployment at 30% and over 45% have been unemployed during their work years. Those that make it through college are burdened by debt. These young people are extraordinarily connected to each other through Facebook and the internet, maintaining close contact with friends across the country. But for politicians and pollsters, these young people are off the radar.



As this young dairist noted, his friends kept up to date with the healthcare debate and the provision that they can be carried on their parents plans until the age of 26. They also were keeningly aware of the whole overhaul of the student loan programs and Obama's commitment to community colleges. And they see their economic situation as a result of the looting of America by Wall Street. Also, they are aware that this President keeps talking and acting on issues that concern them and doesn't just discard their support after the election was over.



Democrats were always hoping for the youth vote but it didn't pan out in the 2000 election for Al Gore and hence conventional wisdom took hold that the young don't vote. What's interesting is that Republicans are banking on the 60+ voter to take back the House. They claim and I always believed them that these are the most reliable voter. But facts can be stubborn things.



The 65 and older voter constituted 10% of the total vote both in the 2006 midterms and the 2008 presidential elections. In both those elections, the parties split the vote evenly. In the 60-65 year voter, the Republicans did marginally better. And in the presidential elections, the only demographic age group that Republicans had a slight advantage were Generation X-ers.



Flip down to the Digital Generation. In the 2006 midterms, they also constituted 10% of the vote also but produced a Democratic margin by 60%-38%. In that election the older vote went 49-49%. In short, the large Democratic victory in the 2006 midterms owed alot to young voters, contrary to our conventional wisdom.



In 2008, the digital generation voted 62-35% for the Democrats and among the 25-29 group, they voted 64-34% for the Democrats. Again their total percentage of the vote remained in line with the older voters.



If you add up the slight advantages of Democrats in the past two elections by age group, the Digital Generation's edge for Democrats represents slightly less than all the other age groups combined! Most worrisome for Republicans is that the party you first vote for remains the same for nearly a generation.



Now, The Republican Party has decided that they are going to run against Barack Obama in the midterms. This is evident by the ads cut by their Governors' Association and their pubic statements. Now, Obama is sitting at 54% approval rating overall in today's Washington Post poll but with the digital generation his approval rating is far above the percentage he received in the last election. Throughout the past year, approval ratings of the digital generation mirror the numbers of Obama in the black and Latino communities.



The young millenial diarist mentioned that his former activists from the last election are ready and available because most of them have been hurt by the recession and have time on their hands. They are the minority not singled out by Fox News and conservative radio. Organizing for America has already been conducting training seminars for them beginning last week. While Republicans did try and suppress the youth vote in many states, it's far less able to now that they are registered. Here the efforts at voter registration last election will pay off for the Democrats.



This generation is immune to the teabaggers as we have seen by polling on that group and have no tendency toward the extremes. The GOP state campaigns against gays, Latinos and the national party's climate change denials simply spark the digital generations' activism. The Tax issue is meaningless to them.



On a last side note, the pundits have mentioned how Republican Jan Brewer's support among whites has increased by 8% in Arizona after she signed the anti-immigration bill. But few mention that Latino support for the Democratic candidate for governor has soared to 77% in a state where Obama only won 56% of the Latino vote. Despite the dominance of the white voter, the solidifying of the Latino vote by such a large margin eradicates Brewer's temporary advantage. Brewer's numbers should fall further because Arizona depends on Mexico for 1/3rd of its economy and now Mexico is boycotting the state.

Those are some reasons to believe that the mid-terms may produce some surprises.

The Digital Generation's Own Revolution--Iran

For a technological troglodyte like myself, I was thrilled by the fax revolutions of the 1980s in Eastern Europe and Russia. During the seige in Russia, when Boris Yeltsin stood on tops of the tanks and faced the Russian army down, I personally received faxes from within the Russian parliament building with instructions to circulate them to the American media to solicit support for the new Russian Revolution. This cumbersome mechanism gave the impression then of political change at the speed of light. Internet later came in and recently the use of cellphones in the Ukraine, Georgia and Zimbabwe. Cellphones were meant for internal organizing outside the communications infrastructure erected by the authoritarian regimes. They did not have the global transmission abilities that we are now seeing in Iran.

The Iranian regime has been perfecting cyber-warfare for the past several years. My own computer has been attacked via the Chinese software "Rain" by the Tehran regime. The regime along with China and other authoritarian governments have spent millions on cyber-warfare to block internet efforts to support groups fighting to build pockets of pluralism within these societies. Farsi is now the number 3 language used on the internet and videocam productions have been shown both ways over the last few years concerning human rights and democracy issues. One group actually has hosted seminars on constitutional and law issues from France, which are broadcast into Iran. No one has been able to judge these efforts until now. Los Angeles, which hosts thousands of Iranians, has been a prime source of movie entertainment downloaded into Tehran.

I have not posted anything for the past ten days because of I've been mesmerized by the campaign in Iran and the aftermath of the protests by the Green Revolution. The most appropriate reference book for this new Iranian Revolution is Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott (McGraw Hill, 2009, $27.95). In the largest study of a generation ever conducted, Tapscott surveyed 11,000 people from the ages 16 to 29, building on his previous work when he surveyed the group of 13-20 year olds for his previous book on Growing Up Digital. This global study was premised on the fact that there was a generation ,which was now coming of age which grew up with digital technology and had thoroughly integrated it into their lives in ways the rest of us could only imagine.

In the next to last chapter of the book, he talks about the net generation and democracy. Within the United States, this generation moved from an apathy toward party politics into full participation in the 2008 campaign, particularly for Barack Obama. Previous to this, the net generation had been active in grassroots community efforts for specific causes or simply as charitable works. Tapscott finished his book in the middle of the 2008 campaign noting that the net generation brought its digital savvy to the Obama campaign through its creative use of Facebook and social networking through the internet. He called the Obama campaign the first campaign of the Digital Generation.

With the dramatic demographic shifts in Iran, some of the same net generation features have shown up to dominate the current Revolution. Activists abroad petitioned Twitter to move their maintance period of the network until 4 am Tehran time so the continued flow of twitter messages could continue to come though to the rest of the world. Cellphones, particularly with video features, played a critical role in relaying the visual images of the Revolution to the outside world. As the regime cracked down on the domestic reformist press and cut down on the foreign media access to cover the country, the Iranian activists have ably filled in the vacuum, playing on several different technologies at once. How much of the internal communication between cities is being done by looping back around foreign networks is hard to tell.

By midday Tuesday, the regime clearly has not been able to create the media blackout of events we have seen in past times. The persistance of communication with the rest of the world has played a critical role in fragmenting the political, religious and security elites of the country. The whole legitimacy of the Supreme Leader has been challenged because of the open information he had quietly contacted the opposition telling them they had won and only hours later proclaiming Ahmadinejad the winner in a very unlikely landslide. It's as if Khamenei had been Youtubed with past comments being contrasted with the present. This became obvious by the emergence of other Ayatollahs emerging to assert the need for a recount or another election altogether. Even seminarians from Qom made their way to Tehran to present petitions of support for the Green Revolution. Through YouTube and Twitter, the digital generation plunged the Islamic Republic into its greatest crisis of legitimacy since the early turmoil after the initial Revolution.

There are many websites here that have been marvelous. Andrew Sullivan at Atlantic began blogging at dawn on election day and has added material ever since. Huffington Post has done a fantastic job of keeping readers abreast with the twitter feed. Dailykos has provided access to orginal Farsi sources throughout this period and several of its bloggers have added links to a variety of sources--large and obscure.

Is Mousavi the Vaclav Havel of Iran? No. He has a long past with involvement in some of the regime's bloodiest episodes. But after a period of political inactivity, he re-entered Iranian politics with a more reformist position. Does he want to change the institutions of the Islamic Republic? No or else he won't be allowed to run in the election. But, we should remember Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as a Communist but ended by dismembering the Soviet Union and removing the Communist party from the controlling position in the political structure. I am sure Mousavi had no clue of the depth of the resistance to the regime. I believe he was as taken by surprise as the regime was.

It is as if the great student movement of the 1990s that closed the country down for a whole month has re-surfaced with the arsenal provided by the net generation. What if they triumph, what does it mean? On the international front, Mousavi has already told Time magazine he is willing to negotiate the nuclear issue. During the campaign, he criticized Ahmadinejad's foreign adventurism, which probably means Mousavi will reign in Hizbullah in Lebanon and support like Khatami, his reformist predecessor, a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine issue. At home, it would mean greater freedoms for the Iranian people but not alot of economic progress. Ultimately, it would mean a normalization of relations with the United States.

For the largest issues concerning the nature of the Islamic Republic, I think time will tell whether the other parts of the 7 point demands could actually be met--the removal of the Supreme leader, the review of the constitution and other fundamental changes.

For now the Digital Generation might have to be content to have fragmented the establishment and set the stage for a future transformation.

This is not an inconsiderable achievement for a bunch of people who twitter.