Forget GM's Plan -- Where's The Government's Plan?

By Jane Hamsher

When Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi sent the Detroit automakers away and told them to come up with a plan, it made me want to put my head through a wall.  Not because the automakers didn't need one, but because they're operating in a black box unless and until the government comes up with their plan. 

While the proposal Jeffrey Leonard puts forward isn't flawless (as Atrios notes), it does start to address the conundrum that the automakers are now faced with:

[O]ur automakers aren't as bad as you think. If you go to Europe or especially China and Asia, you will see excellent small cars produced by Ford and Chevrolet that sell very well. You won't see them in the United States, however, because these are not the cars American have been buying. Like it or not, a major reason that American automakers have built the cars that they've built for the domestic market is that they've had to contend with highly misleading long-term market signals based on cheap gas. While engines have become more efficient over the last thirty years, much of Detroit's ingenuity has gone into giving Americans more power, performance and luxury for the buck rather than more miles per gallon.

We can sit around and wax rhapsodic about highways covered in green cars, but until the government adopts policy that creates demand for them, there is no evidence that anyone will buy them.

There are a variety of ways to create that demand. The most effective would be to impose a substantial gas tax. Another would be to tax weight or horsepower, as many countries do. (This is far better than a luxury tax, as it directly targets the gas wasters, rather than those who might just want a fur-lined Prius.) Such taxes can be phased in slowly or quickly, but the important thing is that if Detroit knows to expect demand for fuel-efficient cars, it will produce many more of them.

You cannot create an effective business plan if you cannot project what the market for your product will be.  A market for green cars can only be guaranteed by government action.  It's a simple and very basic business principle.  If the automakers tell everyone what they want to hear and promise to make small, fuel-efficient cars and yet people continue to want SUVs, Honda and Toyota will supply that market and then everyone will bitch about how GM and Ford are not competitive because they've got shitloads of cars nobody wants.

You can ask them to be profitable, or you can ask them to be energy efficient.  If the government wants them to be both, they have to create the market conditions for that to happen.   

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November 27, 2008

How About Let's Not Demagogue The Auto Industry Crisis?

By Jane Hamsher

Michael Scherer over at Swampland writes today about what a swell idea it would be to have Mitt Romney, who has been demagoguing the auto industry crisis, as "auto czar."  (Mitt's dad was head of an auto maker that is no longer in business, I guess this somehow qualifies him as an expert in the field.)

This, however, is my favorite part:

According to Bloomberg, Obama's transition team is already investigating the possibility of a "swift, prepackaged bankruptcy" to save the industry.

Except officials of the Obama team were swift to deny this-- two days ago.

Now, maybe you think the denial is crap, but it is nonetheless part of the story. 

Here's another part:

• Nobel laureate Paul Krugman: "If GM goes under, which looks like a real possibility, then that's a huge blow to huge anti-stimulus program at exactly the wrong moment."
• Former Treasury Department Director Nouriel Roubini:  "Giving essentially $50 billion of low interest rate loans to automakers is a way to help them… there are about 2 million jobs directly/indirectly related to the auto industry… We have no choice…"
• Digby:  "You simply can't wipe out a million jobs or more as we are just going into a terrible worldwide recession. It's like telling someone they have to go on a diet when they are in the middle of a heart attack."

Krugman and Roubini, you'll remember, "got it right." Digby just says it better than anyone else.  

Conventional wisdom around an auto industry bridge loan seems to be minted by Richard Shelby, and nobody is pointing out that the non-union factories in his right-to-work state would stand to benefit from a Detroit collapse.

This is largely because the UAW has, without question, executed the worst, most non-existent public relations campaign ever.  It's just shocking how bad they are at this, leaving everyone to scramble in their defense.  Tying their fate to the automakers and leaving it to the CEOs to present their case seems fraught with risk. (If I was Gettlefinger I'd be on a plane to China looking for buyers to save my members' pensions, but nobody asked me.)

But the breezy lack of concern for what the impact of a bankruptcy would be (managed or otherwise) on an economy where one in ten jobs is tied to the Big 2 1/2 is pretty gobsmacking in its own right, especially coming as it does from a class of people who are openly hostile to labor and think retirees and their pensions can be easily reduced to statistics in some spread sheet.

If people are going to juggle with economic knives here using Time Magazine as a stage, it is too much to ask that they be able to use the Google?

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November 23, 2008

Should GM Survive? A Wall Street Analyst's View

By Jane Hamsher

Editor's Note: For arguments in favor of a GM bailout, see Jane Hamsher's Tuesday post, Zapping the Volt and Slouching Towards Bankruptcy, by Marissa Colón-Margolies.

I watched with interest the first round of questioning by Senate Democrats of the Big 3 auto execs yesterday.  They're still dancing around each other but the battle lines have been drawn:  Right-to-work red state senators want to destroy Detroit so Toyota and Honda can build beatific non-union plants in their states, while the Big 3 execs assert that all they need is cash to weather the current credit crunch and it will all be beer and skittles again.

We know the first group is full of shit, but how about the second?

I had a very enlightening converation with former Wall Street GM analyst Ron Glantz, who is also a founding partner of Pantera Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund.   Ron made the Institutional Investor All America Research team 17 times, and was the number-one auto analyst for seven consecutive years. 

Although we have a philosophical difference about the situation at hand, his analysis is sobering and deserves serious consideration.

Ron's message was unambiguous -- he believes that Congress should let GM die. 

In his 60 Minutes appearance, Obama said that he believed that assistance to the auto industry should be "conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all the stakeholders coming together with a plan (for) what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like."

Ron didn't think such a thing was feasible for a variety of reasons I'll get to later, but I asked him to humor me.  Assuming that the government somehow took on responsibility for the healthcare of GM workers, what would such a plan look like?

Ron said that first and foremost, unions would have to accelerate their 2010 concessions and vote to surrender their pensions, which are also a part of the legacy costs -- "difficult," he said, "because retirees vote in elections and there are 4 or 5 retirees for every one still working."

Secondly, he said that "bondholders have to agree to trade in their bonds for equity in order to remove the interest payments on the bonds and improve the industry's balance sheet." 

When he was analyzing GM 2 years ago, the outstanding bonds had a $300 billion face value.  It's less now because they sold off part of GMAC, but because a lot of their sales were to blue collar workers who needed financing, the credit crunch means they can't sell cars.  One of the reasons for the October sales collapse was that in September, GMAC stopped auto leasing and raised credit standards. 

The overriding problem, however -- and the one he thinks is insurmountable -- is the legacy of bad product that the US auto makers have in this country.  

Right now, it's harder to sell American cars in America than it is to sell foreign brands.  So if Toyota and Chevy make the exact same car, the American car has to be sold for $4000 less (factoring in both American buyer's nervousness that the brand will go bankrupt, along with bad product legacy). Ron said that American automakers have now developed the same worker productivity that the Japanese automakers had by changing their culture, and can build just as good a car, but consumer trust isn't there and nobody will buy them at the value they will give for a foreign brand.

"The guy who buys an American car is like the only person at the party who doesn't get the joke," he said.

His experience tells him that Waggoner represents "genuinely bad management.  He likes Bob Lutz (father of the Volt) but thinks that he is "fighting with one and a half hands tied behind his back."  He also thinks highly of GM President Fritz Henderson.

He thinks the Volt is largely a PR concern at this point because it doesn't have a battery and there isn't the R&D; money available for Lutz to work with (though the battery issue seems to have had some resolution).   He says the Cruze may be a very good car, but they're going to build and sell them them in Korea because it costs less to build there.  He also believes the Malibu is an excellent car.

For the near future, he thinks that GM has a much brighter possibilities overseas where there is more faith in their brand.  Just this month they put cash into a Russian auto plant because they can build Opals there, and it seems that Buicks actually sell quite briskly in China.

Possibly the most interesting thing he said was that Americans are never going to buy low-mileage cars at a price that is going to be profitable to auto manufacturers unless there is a gas tax levied.  So what he proposes is that an escalating gas tax be put in place for the future in order to give people time to prepare, such that they know gas will cost $4 a gallon at the end of this year, then $4.25, then $4.50, etc.  Otherwise, both demand and profitability are going to lie with gas hogs whenever gas prices are low.

Bottom line -- he thinks GM should probably just declare bankruptcy, break the contracts with the unions, close 75% of the plants and sell the rest to the Japanese with the promise to employ some UAW workers.  He said GM passed the tipping point years ago and is probably beyond redemption, and that he sees no need for the United States to have an ongoing auto manufacturing interest.

I have a fundamental philosophical belief that the US should not cede domestic auto manufacturing to foreign companies for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which is I think it would be demoralizing and economically destabilizing at a difficult time.  But after listening to Ron, it because clear that the most daunting task before GM is the rehabilitation of its brand.  The $1000 per car legacy costs pale beside the $4000 devaluation due to lack of consumer confidence.

If it's possible for GM to come back, the hope really does rest with the Volt.  Its $40,000 pricetag means it's not going to be a cheap mass-market car, but much like the "green marketing halo" that the Prius cast over the Toyota brand, the Volt has the potential to reinvigorate GM's image.  Reviews are glowing, and the 100+ mpg it promises put it leagues ahead of anything else from a major manufacturer on the market at the same time. 

If GM were making crap cars, not even the Volt could save them.  But as Ron notes, they are making cars that are just as good as those produced by Japanese manufacturers.   They can deliver the goods.

Day 1 of the auto hearings (liveblogged by emptywheel and he NYT) were very dramatic and compelling.  It will be interesting to watch over the next few days to see if the automakers, the unions and the lawmakers try to cobble together the kind of plan Obama has called for, a vision for a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" -- if such a thing is possible.

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November 19, 2008

Zapping the Volt

By Jane Hamsher

It's hard to imagine that at a time when an unprecedented amount of wealth is held by the top 1% of the US population -- 24% in as of 2006, a level not seen since just before the depression -- that a lot of cuff-snapping over-educated David Brooks types would commence a crusade against working people.

"Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," says Andrew Sullivan.  With spittle-flecked rage, Charles Krauthammer writes, "hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48."

In fact, in their last contract the UAW made deep concessions that put GM wages at a par with their non-union counterparts in the US.  But this isn't about facts, this is a religious crusade where "free-marketeers" want to impose Shock Doctrine tactics for philosophical reasons with little regard for the consequences.

Bloomberg reports that a General Motors failure would cost the federal government $200 billion.   And the Center for Automotive Research concludes that if the Big Three fail, it will mean the loss of 3 million jobs in the first year of collapse.

As Naomi Klein has writen, proponents of unfettered capitalism are always looking for these "clean slates" where other people pay the price in misery for their philosophical experiments.   But as Paul Krugman noted on This Week when he ate George Will for a mid-morning snack, expecting the economy to absorb that kind of impact right now would be extraordinarily risky. 

But let's explore things from another angle.   The same people salivating to put the UAW out of business once and for all are often the ones preaching about how green fuel technology will save our economy.  Labor may be unseemly, but green? 

Well, that's hip.  Quoth the selfsame Andrew Sullivan:

The whole world stands to gain. Not only would the policy switch reduce carbon gases that may well be contributing to global warming. It would also help defuse a looming global superpower fight between China and the US over oil supplies.

So maybe the people who seem to know even less about auto manufacturing than they do about economics should consider that GM is in the forefront of green engineering with the Chevy Volt.  From US News:

The prototype Volt that GM has been showing off is a sporty four-seater with futuristic touches meant to draw in mainstream gearheads. The dashboard controls are touch-sensitive and set in a white console reminiscent of an iPod. Instead of standard gauges for speed and RPMs, there's a digital display that looks like the screen of a Sony PSP. Wind-tunnel engineering has made the Volt even more aerodynamic than a Corvette, critical for milking the most mileage possible out of the battery. GM says that recharging the car at home, through an ordinary household outlet, will cost less than $1 per day and drain less power than it takes to run a refrigerator.

But before you put the Volt on your 2010 wish list, consider that sending GM into bankruptcy would do more than just break the UAW -- it could condemn the Volt from ever reaching the market: 

In Chapter 11, creditors and a bankruptcy judge have a lot of say over corporate strategy, and it could get hard to justify large expenditures for a futurecar at the expense of mainstream offerings today.

Despite its allure--and the attention the Volt would get if it succeeded--GM officials admit it will be a low-volume car for several years, with sales of perhaps 20,000 per year. Would GM be able to justify spending on the Volt while, say, delaying the launch a mainstream compact car like the Chevy Cruze, which is also due in 2010 and could promise annual sales of 150,000 or 200,000? It stands to reason that GM has plans to use the Volt's electric-drive technology in other vehicles, which would be essential to justify the expense. But in Darwinian times, survival trumps nice-to-have, and in order to get to 2015 you have to first make it through 2009. Besides, if gas prices continue to fall, will drivers really care that much if the Volt cuts yearly gas consumption by 500 gallons?

It's sexy for "fiscal conservatives" to stand around pontificating that the US auto makers are in bad shape because they make nothing but gas hogs, but the fact of the matter is that until oil prices soared, gas guzzlers like the Escalade have been big sellers.  

Despite that, GM has been putting money into green technology that might not be profitable for years.

As David W. Patterson of GM Canada explains, there has been "a profound, massively expensive transformation" taking place at GM over the past two years:

...one that now sees us offering more new hybrid models than any other auto manufacturer for the 2009 model year, leading on R&D and the introduction of electric cars, winning many prestigious new-car and green-technology awards, and, most importantly, placing GM's cost structure (including our labour and legacy costs) on track to be among the lowest of any global auto manufacturer. That transformation continues with enormous investment - and not a small amount of pain."

What happens if David Brooks gets his way, GM goes bankrupt and the labor unions are broken?   Is this going to lead to the magnificent stripping down and modernizing of the auto industry that everyone is hoping for that will have us all peddling around in solar powered cars by next Easter?

In a word, no.  Without help to ride out the storm, the Volt research and development money is going to be too expensive to maintain for a company in receivership that is looking only to keep the doors open:

If GM were healthier, these would represent the kinds of reasonable risks that global companies have to take in order to be competitive down the road. But GM is hurting, and the pain is going to get worse.

All this screaming about bankrupting GM has everything to do with a conservative philosophical imperative that the free market will set all these things right, that unions are bad and they are an affront to free enterprise.  It's a moral position not a rational one, and it persists despite all evidence to the contrary.   It should have been thoroughly discredited by this point, but alas, some continue to cling to it.  The problems being suffered by the auto companies right now are nothing more than a shock doctrine opportunity to destroy the UAW to them.  They either have not come to terms with the fact that one in every twelve jobs in this country have income that is tied to the Big 3, or they simply don't care.

Or, like Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, they come from right-to-work states that would benefit from Detroit's demise.  Shelby may carp about "the uncompetitive structure of [the Big Three's] manufacturing and labor force," but as Marcy Wheeler notes, his state is home to the non-union plants that make M-Class SUV, GL-Class SUV, Pilot SUV, Santa Fe SUV, plus engines for Tacoma and Tundra pick-ups and Sequoia SUVs.  

Not exactly a vision in green.

Back in 2005, Obama sponsored the "Healthcare For Hybrids" act, whereby the government would assume Big 3 legacy costs if the auto industry would use the savings to invest in fuel efficient vehicles.  It was a forward-looking piece of legislation that holds out a lot of hope that Obama understands the problems of American auto manufacturers and is willing to address them in innovative ways.

Let's hope there's enough pressure brought to bear today on Mitch McConnell, Kit Bond and other Republicans whose states would be hard hit by a Big 3 bankruptcy to keep them functional until Obama takes office and better minds are in charge of addressing the problem. 

Because as emotionally satisfying as it would be for the Italian loafer set to see the unemployment numbers of the great unwashed swell with union workers as the UAW is crushed, it would be an enormous setback to the hope of a green resurrection of the American economy.

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November 17, 2008

Give Lieberman the Bum's Rush (Forever)

By Jane Hamsher

According to Roll Call, Obama is now actively helping Joe Lieberman retain his Homeland Security chairmanship:

Support for Lieberman appears to have been growing since Obama began making calls to several top Democrats to discuss the Connecticut Senator's status. Since then, several senior Senators began making statements that seemed to indicate a willingness to let Lieberman retain his gavel.

In addition to telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he would like for Senate Democrats to find a way to keep Lieberman in the Democratic fold, Obama has had similar conversations with other top Democrats – including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Lieberman's home-state colleague, Dodd, sources said.

Obama is close with all four of those Senators, each of whom endorsed him in his quest to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination this year.

The public argument for keeping Lieberman doesn't have any connection to the actual reasons his fellow Senators are supporting him. Evan Bayh was on Rachel Maddow last night, making the completely incoherent argument that the Democratic Caucus will control Lieberman and the Homeland Security Committee:

MADDOW: Joe Lieberman didn't investigate the government's response to Katrina or the Blackwater shootings in Iraq or anything like that. Are there going to be real interparty divisions on security issues, or do you see a united front going forward?

BAYH: Well, I would hope we would have a united front. And you know, if the caucus and the committee feels that there are areas worthy of investigation -- and you mentioned two that I think would warrant investigation -- then there should -- one would need to go forward, regardless of what the chairman happen to think. And we have the power to demand that sort of thing.

Really? So if Bayh thinks that Lieberman should have investigated Katrina like he said he would (a promise he abandoned immediately after the GOP helped him retain his Senate seat), why didn't they do something before? They're going to take action and make him do it now?

I'm supposed to believe this?

This isn't about "getting stuff done" or "putting partisan politics behind us" as Bayh claims -- this is about conservative Senators who are concerned that "the base" can do to them what they did to Lieberman. It's about Obama making them comfortable that no one will be able to organize against the war, or FISA, or any of their pet projects in a way that could be threatening to them.

I spoke with a source knowledgeable about Reid's reasoning on the Lieberman matter early on in the process, who said that Reid believed taking Lieberman's Homeland Security gavel away from him was more likely to keep him in line with the Democrats -- not less. Knowing that Lieberman can't get elected in Connecticut in 2012 as a Republican and that the Democrats were ready to crack the whip, it was not unreasonable to make an inference that that Lieberman would stop making so much trouble.

Any action on the part of the Senate Democrats will be unlikely to change the nature of Lieberman's voting, which will continue to be petty and vindictive no matter what the Democrats do.

But the fact remains that over the past 7-10 days all the lobbying has been done by the pro-Lieberman forces. "We don't have a spokesperson with the courage to speak up and say 'he should not be able to get away with what he's done to our caucus,'" said the source.

It's interesting that they sent Bayh as the messenger on to the Maddow show, despite the fact that someone like Dodd would undoubtedly be more well-received. After Steve Clemons of the Washington Note published that Bayh was at the top of the VP list, vociferous opposition among the netroots dashed any chance of success.

It's also noteworthy that people now think, much like Obama did when he made a GOTV appearance before the election, that the Maddow show is the way to plead their case before the base. (They're right, BTW.)

But Bayh's appearance was for Bayh. His concern -- like that of Salazar and Pryor and other Democrats whose voting records are probably often to the right of Lieberman's -- is for himself. It isn't about putting partisanship behind us.

It's about political payback, and just as partisan as it can possibly be.

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November 13, 2008

Schumer and Durbin Want Lieberman Stripped of Homeland Security

By Jane Hamsher

Newsweek's Howard Fineman on Keith Olbermann:

[Obama's] going to leave it up to a vote I think. What my sources tell me is that there's likely to be a vote next Tuesday. The Senate Democrats will caucus when they come back for the lame duck session. They'll all go into a room, Joe Lieberman will make his case for maintaining his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, then there will be a secret ballot vote.

Obama's opinion is sort of on record via Harry Reid, and we'll see how it goes.

Interestingly, people like Dick Durbin who is the first Democrat in the Senate -- the first Senator, and from Illinois, to support Barack Obama -- is really loaded for bear about Lieberman, he wants to kick Lieberman off that Chairmanship. Chuck Schumer, the head of the Campaign Committee likewise.

So it could be a very close vote, and it'll be left to the secret ballot of the Senators. You've got Evan Bayh and you've got Chris Dodd who are supporting Lieberman, but there are a lot of other people who are still angry at him for the very comments you were talking about just a little while ago.

One point I think needs to be made. This isn't about Joe Lieberman maintaining membership in a country club as a matter of feel-good "bipartisanship." There's actually a job that needs doing here, and when Chris Dodd and Evan Bayh say that they want Lieberman to retain his chairmanship, they are saying that the extraordinary waste, graft, greed and cronyism that have built the Department of Homeland Security to a bloated, ineffectual taxpayer-funded behemoth under Joe Lieberman is just fine.

Here's Naomi Klein from The Shock Doctrine:

In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business. Yet what is most striking is how little the security boom is analysed and discussed as an economy, as an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison.

No-bid contracts kept from public scrutiny in the name of "national security" have built a department of unprecedented waste and theft, all rubber stamped and protected from Senate investigation by Joe Lieberman's chairmanship. And what has it gotten us? Nothing. Basically, the Department of Homeland Security became just another front for the military industrial complex to feed off American taxpayers while neocons like Lieberman screamed "terror terror terror, just trust us."

The FY 2009 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security is $50.5 billion, a 6.8% increase over 2008.

What Bayh and Dodd are saying is that they like Joe so much that this is a small price to pay, that the status quo is just fine and that there is no real need for change.

I wonder if taxpayers agree that $50.5 billion is chump change so long everyone can still sing kumbaya on the Senate floor?

Good for Schumer and Durbin for putting public stewardship over old-boy clubbiness and saying "no."

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November 11, 2008

How Will Obama Govern?

By Jane Hamsher

There is much speculation going on right now about how Obama would govern if elected president. On Sunday John Kerry was on Meet the Press talking about how he would urge Obama to "build 85-vote majorities" in the Senate. Doug Schoen, the political mastermind whose strategy for the past eight years has largely been telling Democrats to accommodate George Bush, says that Obama must demonstrate his commitment to bipartisanship by appointing Republicans to his cabinet.

That may be fabulous political speech, but people who pay even remotely close attention to politics know that in order to get 85 votes on anything in the Senate, you're basically telling lobbyists and the corporate cons who pay them that they've got veto power over any legislation. There is no shiny new bill with pearly white teeth that is going to make everyone happy--if there were, it would've passed already. Eighty five votes is the political equivalent of the status quo.

What's surprising is that in the very next breath, and with no apparent sense of contradiction, people will talk about the likelihood of Rahm Emanuel being Obama's Chief of Staff. It's a real knee-slapper. Rahm and 85 votes? You've got to be kidding. It will be an instant sign that all the bipartisan talk is just that--talk--and signal that Obama intends to work solely within the Democratic caucus to achieve his objectives. The Republicans would be welcome to tag along if they like.

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November 4, 2008

Access, Not Apathy

By Michael Connery

I've spent a lot of time here in the past two months busting myths about young voters. I've talked about rising youth turnout and the boom in youth infrastructure. I've talked about the proper use of celebrities in GOTV campaigns, and the roles of Obama and online tools in mobilizing youth. In all instances, my purpose was to highlight the incredible gains we've made since 2003 in engaging young voters. This election stands to be the first time since 18 year olds were granted the right to vote that youth turnout at the polls will increase for the third straight campaign cycle. We are now at the point in which the youth vote is increasingly competitive with, and at times surpasses, the over 65 vote. That's a good thing.

In response to my posts, I've seen comments expounding on the problem of "youth apathy" and claims that youth won't vote unless we reinstate the draft. Others threw their hands up in helplessness, stating that the youth vote will only turn out for charismatic candidates and so there's not much we can do to boost turnout. The implication is that current trends are nothing more than a statistical blip.

So here's the bad. I concede to these commenters that young voters still turn out (generally speaking) in fewer numbers than other segments of the electorate. However, this has nothing to do with voter apathy, the draft, candidate charisma, or any other reason that is part of the conventional wisdom about youth participation. Young voters participate at lower rates because the system is rigged to make it is hard as possible to participate.

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August 1, 2008

Doing More With Less

By Michael Connery

One of my all-time favorite television shows is HBO's The Wire. So it's a little surreal to feel like I'm living in an episode. No, I'm not involved in the drug trade or police department. I'm not a stevedore losing my union job, and I'm not a school teacher struggling with No Child Left Behind. Like the reporters and police officers in the fifth and final season of the show, though, I feel like my work, and the work of many of my colleagues are not being adequately supported. In short, the youth vote community is being asked "to do more with less."

As I've written many times before, 2004 was a boom year for youth organizing as the progressive movement built many new institutions (and strengthened others) to reach out to young voters. There were two driving forces behind this boom: entrepreneurial activism on the part of young people, and a willingness among donors to take risks and support that work. The results were impressive and verified by independent research.

This year, the "surging" youth vote is one of the most important stories of the election cycle, and one would think that interest in moving as many young voters to the polls as possible would be a high priority. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. Many of the organizations responsible for engaging young voters in 2004 and 2006, and many new organizations working to fill holes in the youth engagement sphere, are struggling to raise funds and scale up their operations for the fall.

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July 24, 2008

In Youth Organizing, the Old Becomes New Again

By Michael Connery

Update: This post has been updated in response to the comment by Jesse Kocher to more accurately represent the relationships and roles of Driving Votes, Swing Semester, and Swing the State. Thanks to Jesse for the clarifications.

In 2004, Democratic politics witnessed a boom in youth organizing. Young people created dozens of new institutions that pioneered non-traditional methods for engaging their peers on and offline. Drinking clubs that maintained political interest and moved people slowly into political activism, road trips to swing states, peer to peer voter registration and candidate fundraising at small live music events, the list goes on and on.

These were not always the best and most efficient organizations on the block, but they identified and filled a vacuum in progressive youth politics that was not filled by traditional organizations like the PIRGs and the College Democrats. They pioneered new tactics, changed the way that many political activists thought about organizing, and they engaged many young voters that would not otherwise become involved in politics, helping to drive 4.3 million new young voters to the polls in 2004.

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July 19, 2008