I think more progressives should get a taste of living in Colorado Springs or similar cities. I have spent my whole life here, and being surrounded by all the main types of Republican. I live in a precinct that only is 18% Democrat. My best friend is a Republican (as is my father.) My editor-in-chief at the University's campus newspaper was a Republican. One has no difficulty being faced with conservative arguments and thus it is vital to sharpen one's rhetoric. It is too easy to echo weak talking points when you are confronted with nods of agreement rather than critical questioning.
Lacking a conservative environment, we at least need to be more self-critical, more willing to face the opposing arguments before we face opposing argument.

I guess I'm not surprised that young progressives seem pretty lame in debate encounters.  I watch with despair as Republicans on TV unabashedly play fast and loose with history and facts and the Democrats, with few exceptions,  just don't seem to expect it after all these years and still don't know how to respond to  it.  When they should be responding with "that's absolute right wing propaganda mill garbage and here's why...." they seem stunned that they're in a position of having to come up with any response at all.  Democrats, young or old, have to get rid of the idea that the truth must be perfectly self-evident to your audience.  That audience has been saturated for so long by such a steady stream of right wing sewage that it's prepared to believe just about everything.  Republicans first learn the enduringly accurate adage:  no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of that audience.  You don't just have have to hit back, you have to hit first and hit hard.  Democrats don't appear to understand that.

It has been about 15 years since I was at Vanderbilt.  (And a big no thanks to this post for reminding me of that!)  One of my proudest moments was watching my friend William who was editor of the College Newspaper lay into William F Buckley.  It was great.

 What distinquished William from most people is that he was a certified genius who had earned a full academic scholarship to Vandy, and who could have gone on to any law school in the country had he chosen too. (Last I heard he was working for Phil Bredesen.)

It seems like most of the College Republicans I knew were guys who entered their freshman year with an eye towards law school.  They weren't any smarter than anyone else, but they knew that being articulate and forceful was a requirement to winning an argument.  They were also likely to be Greeks which requires/cultivates a certain kind of useful social skill.  

 Most of the liberals, and I count myself as one of these, could write better than they could speak.  Most of them also had zero interest in law school require a number of skills, among them the ability/willingness to verbally slug it out and compete. 

Perhaps these talents explain why the liberal blogs are so well written, and why Fox and Right Wing Radio seem to have an unending supply of talkers. 

William was one of those rare college liberals who was both articulate and enough of a competitor that he wasn't afraid to humiliate someone if challenged. 

When I became an active Democrat, I had already lived most of my life hearing about Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Even during the Eisenhower years, the Congress was Democratic for the most part. Then, in 1960 Kennedy lit my 18 year old fire, and I campaigned hard for him. Even with all of the Kennedy magic that year, my college campus remained much more Republican than Democratic.

Fast forward 45 years. Look at the political climate today's college students have lived through that forms the context of their lifetime. For 25 years, they have been constantly exposed to the deification of Ronald Reagan (still can't believe this nation spent half a billion dollars on his funeral!) and the shaming of Jimmy Carter, the Gulf War victory euphoria, the attempt to destroy Bill Clinton, and now the Second Coming courtesy of George W. Bush. 

It's no wonder that today's college Republicans are more invigorated. They have heroes. role models, and a sense of winning and righteousness on their side. They've been told they're the chosen. From what I've heard here, college Democrats have been pretty much left to fend for themselves in a political wilderness.

We reap what we sow.

Observations from a life-long Yellow Dog New Deal  Democrat, now semi-retired at 62.  From my days in undergraduate school, through grad school and  as a professor of history at what Tank McNamarra called an ESU [Enormous State University]  for  a little more than three decades, watching YDs get clobbered in public forums by YRs, I have sadly concluded that the major problem was, is, and continues to be simply this:  YRs do their homework and YDs don't.  YRs come to such forums armed with references from history, statistics from the economy, and a grasp of legislation and judicial decisions that is extensive, detailed and on-call for them to apply as the need arrises.  Often what they bring up, especially with respect to history and the economy is flawed and occasionally downright wrong and certainly can be effectively countered, but the YDs don't have at their finger-tips the knowledge,  the grasp of the evidence [fact, illustration, example] necessary to do it.   Earnestness and really, really, really believing in the goodness of their cause are not sufficient substitutes for the work needed to become an effective debater or discussant in a public forum.  So, sad to say,  the problem seems relatively easy to understand:  YRs do their homework for public appearances, YDs don't.   Yes, there are exceptions. But, sadly, in my experience, not many of them.

My experience is definitely skewed, but here are a few of things we've been doing (or are planning to do) to keep the club active (and cool) in between elections:

• Local activism: Gay marraige is a huge issue in MA at the moment, so we've been doing research on the societal effects of gay marriage, public acceptance of BGLTQs, etc.

• Speakers: Having a brand-name school helps in bringing in big names but College Dems usually have more connections / resources than other student groups.

• Debates: In addition to monthly debates with the Republicans, we're going to hold debate "training sessions" where our more experienced debaters (especially those with experience in forensics, Model Congress, etc.) play devil's advocate against our less experienced debaters.

• Professors: Invite liberal professors to lunch or dinner and get a small group of students to sit down and talk with them.  It builds understanding of the arguments and provides plenty of talking points.

• Discussions: Given the current messaging problems with the Dems, we've been inviting progressive students from any group or background to sit down with us and discuss our stances on issues--partyline be damned.

• Publicity stunts: Our 25-hr. student filibuster wasn't as crazy as Princeton's, but it did bring attention to the issue and get us some publicity

• Op-eds: Use the College Dem label to send op-eds to student papers and local newspapers.  There are tons of people

Passion, or enthusiasm is a necessary condition for changing the world, or the nation, or the East Overshoe County School Board.  But it is far from being a sufficient condition to achieve those ends.   My suggestion was not that passion over politics is not a good thing, but that, by itself, it is  not nearly good enough.

  As  for universities and colleges not being the "real world,"  forgive me, but that is  nonsense born, I suspect, of too many viewings of Animal House .   They are as real, and as unreal, as their inmates [faculty and students alike] choose to make them.   Try telling some of my present students [teaching as retired adjunct at a mid-sized undergraduate public university] who are holding down full time jobs, with families, and attending the the U.  as well that they are not "in the real world."    I haven't seen the latest numbers, but when last I checked some years ago, the number of HS graduates who attend at least some college was nudging fifty percent. 

   Finally,  I think you can make a reasonable case for the notion that many young people have their ideas about politics, about "the public good," about citizenship, about what roles they will [or will not] play for at least the next period of their adulthood, shaped in and by their experiences at college. More goes into the mix, of course, but their experiences on campus are not a trivial part of that mix.  Given that, what happens at public forums on campuses does matter, and does have consequences down the line, possibily for years.  The YRs seem to know this and to act on campuses on that knowledge.  I suspect YDs do not.  And as long as progressives [broadly speaking] tend to dismiss the experience of students... all kinds of students on all kinds of campuses.... as somehow not "real world" experience and living in a cacoon, then I suspect the YR types will continue to be more and more effective on and, later, off the campus.

You wrote ... "As  for universities and colleges not being the "real world,"  forgive me, but that is  nonsense born, I suspect, of too many viewings of Animal House ."

No, it comes from years in environmental work serving on committees loaded with academics who did not have the foggiest idea about how to talk plainly and win politically.

I was the president of the Case Democrats at Case Western Reserve University when we hosted the VP Debate last October. We had bigger mailing lists, more attendance at meetings, better fundraising, better press in the student newspaper and better media coverage during the debate. We tried our best and, while we may have been the outlier, we were certainly one example of the College Democrats beating the College Republicans at this game.

Berkeley has an outstanding college debate program, but that's a different issue.

http://www.wfu.edu/organizations/NDT/NDT2005.pdf
 

The people are there; we outnumber them.  But we lack a strong network and the work ethic.  Additionally, most CDs/YDs suffer from terrible neglect.  Do you have any idea how little money it would take to provide each of the 50 states with three  expert campus organizers (at $30K a pop) to just travel the state to start, build/rebuild or strengthen Democratic activist groups: $4.5 million.  George Soros just made that in the amount of time it took me to write this post.

Finally, from my observation no one really goes to or cares about the CR vs. CD debates except people who are already members of both groups. 

It's been 20+ years since I was in college and grad school, but hearing these comments makes me believe that not much has changed in two decades.

The conservatives (led on my campus twenty years ago by guys with names like Jon Podhoretz and David Brooks) presented themselves as calm, rational, intellectual, clear headed. By contrast, the liberals (for some reason, I can't remember any of their names) were always screeching--usually about something that seemed more about their own personal issues than about anything universal--the "I'm queer, I'm here" kinda stuff. . . their discourse was all about anger and rebellion, without much attention to logic and facts.

This of course is unfortunate, because really the liberals were often right. But they seemed more interested in making noise than making sense. In a debate, the Podhoretz's and Brooks's killed the liberals because the conservatives had done the research and were willing to make logical (if flawed) arguments. The liberals were better at shouting cliches.

Not sure what to do about it . . . just seems like liberals need fewer hormones . . . but at that age, the excess hormones have some advantages . . . the liberals were always sexier and far more fun to be around . . .

Parli or Policy? At any rate, there's a reason I quit real debate =D.

U-C Berkeley does not develop good debaters. Berkeley regularly has students that were good HS debaters go to school at Berkeley because Berkeley is otherwise a great school. Those students do as well as their own previously developed talent carries them. Some years, that's very far.

However, other years, Berkeley doesn't even send a single pair to the NDT while a SoCal Community College in Berkeley's region has two pairs get invited.

(Yeah, we were in U-C Berkeley's region).