Obama’s youth registration drive

Knowing of my interest in Barack Obama’s appeal to young voters, his S.C. campaign brought this to my attention:

Obama Campaign Launches
Youth Voter Registration Drive

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Beginning tomorrow, Barack Obama’s South Carolina campaign will launch a week-long effort to register 1,000 new voters on college and high school campuses across the state.
    In addition to the registration drives, the campaign will hold events in Orangeburg and Greenville next week focused on registering and organizing young people. (Details on the events will be announced next week.)
    “Barack Obama’s message about fundamentally changing our politics has energized and inspired young people,” Obama South Carolina Youth Vote Director Elizabeth Wilkins said. “Now we have to make sure they’re registered to vote and get them to the polls.”
    The campaign will have a presence on at least 40 high school, college and university campuses across the state next week, registering young people to vote. In its drive to engage and mobilize high school and college students, the campaign held a public rally at Coastal Carolina University in Conway last week where Obama attracted nearly 2,000 people.

As it happens, I’m not the only one who has been impressed by the way the freshness Obama’s message seems a natural for the idealistic young. Of course, some of those who are thus impressed are less than impartial. Moss Blachman, whose son Max I mentioned in connection with the campaign in my recent column, said he spent a day with the Obama kids and found the phenomenon rather inspiring.

And Phil Noble from down Charleston way has urged me to revisit the subject, going so far as to give me the names and/or contact info on 10 impressive young Obama supporters. I had to smile when I saw the names, because it brings up the old editorial board joke, "Who’s his daddy?" (The joke is both on us and on South Carolina. We’ve been doing this so long, and South Carolina is a sufficiently small state, that whenever somebody news breaks onto to the political scene, it seems that as often as not, we know his or her parents.) He mentioned Max (although as "Moss and Penny Blackman’s son," not by name), and our own Laurin — but we know them, right? Both reformed bloggers.

He also listed Anton Gunn, who I thought was a particularly impressive legislative candidate, and three others who had very familiar last names — such as Bakari Sellers, son of Cleveland.

So yeah, I probably will get back to the subject — or maybe I just did.

15 thoughts on “Obama’s youth registration drive”

  1. Mark Morris

    Obama is running a tight race in these early states according to most polls. What may surprise people is how Obama’s numbers are likely to be larger than the polls say, largely because pollsters ignore the youth vote thinking they won’t turn out. Now we have a candidate we can all get behind because we can trust his motives, and his intellectual power is unparalleled. We have the opportunity to elect a person that energizes people and inspires hope.

  2. vwcat

    Mark, While pollsters may ignore the young and write them off as non voting they fail to take into concideration that in order for them to be motivated to go to the polls, they have to have someone they can believe in and who speaks to them and reaches them.
    Like in 1960. It was because of the youth vote and their support that another young and so called inexperienced senator was propelled through the primaries against the establishment candidate and went all the way to the white house.
    Without the youth vote, there would have not been a JFK.
    It is high time the adults remember this and the youth take inspiration of it.

  3. ricky

    Obama, like the youth vote, is a wonderful “idea”. But in the end, neither will be much more than a thought.
    In every election of my life there has always been a “youth vote” that was going to change America. The problem is…it never does.

  4. weldon VII

    People keep likening Obama and JFK, speaking of the youth vote and hope.
    Well, I remember George McGovern and the youth vote, and that gives me hope.

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