Anna Quindlen: Waiting in Line

[babylonsister]

THE LAST WORD
Anna Quindlen
Waiting in Line

If the millennials seize the (election) day, they could transform the terms of American civic engagement for decades to come.
Published Nov 1, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Nov 10, 2008


Over the past decade American children have, from time to time, lined up at malls and on Main Street, dressed as wizards or wearing owlish spectacles, waiting to buy a book. You could see this as the power of the Harry Potter series, or as the enrichment of author J. K. Rowling. But if you take the long view, what you see are millions of inveterate readers being built from the ground up. Some version of this may well have happened during this presidential-election season. Analysts have learned to be skeptical of the so-called youth vote, but all signs suggest that this may be the moment when the country begins to create a new cadre of lifelong voters.

Evidence of this good news is both statistical and anecdotal. Turnout by young voters in the 2008 primaries and caucuses was nearly twice that of eight years before. Rock the Vote has signed up 2.3 million this year, as opposed to 1.4 million in 2004, which at the time was a watershed. On a more-micro level, the chairman of the Department of Government and Politics at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, who has taken students to the Inauguration every four years, told a reporter that in the past it took months to fill a single bus. This year he is chartering two, since the first one filled within days.

The last big bump among young voters came in 1972, the first presidential election after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Despite revisionist history that suggests that all young people then were antiwar and counterculture, the youth vote split pretty evenly between George McGovern and Richard Nixon. Roughly half of those casting their first vote chose a man who was trounced on election night, and the other half chose a man who had to resign the presidency in disgrace less than two years later.

It's difficult to figure out how much effect this had on voter turnout in the decades that followed, but the undeniable fact is that Americans have exercised the franchise less vigorously than a participatory democracy might wish. There are dozens of documents in my filing cabinet about proposals to change that, from turning voting into a lottery—civic responsibility and a million bucks!—to moving Election Day to the weekend.

That particular file has grown dusty this year. Primary turnouts reached historic highs, including among new voters. The onetime collateral issues that concern them—and that were often ignored by elected officials—have gone mainstream: gay rights, the environment, the cost of a college education. And the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as their generation's racial and ethnic diversity, reinforced their sense of themselves as engaged citizens of the world. These are the millennials, more pragmatic and optimistic than their parents.

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/166815