In response to the commenters from yesterday, I thought that I would use my last day here at Table of One to talk about young people and policy. Typically, politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies. It was even a running joke among some old Music for America colleagues that John Kerry would go to college campuses in 2004 and talk about Medicare (or whatever the “hot” issue was during that media cycle). It was the use of students as props for the latest talking point, not as a constituency to be taken seriously in itself.

This is something of a chicken/egg problem. Politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies precisely because it is their belief that young people don’t vote, and young people don't vote because they don't hear anything relevant to their lives in the policy discussion. This week I’ve focused largely on the new infrastructure that exists to get young people to vote precisely because I think it’s up to us to break this vicious cycle. If we turn out, politicians will take notice and our issues will be addressed. I agree with the commenters that thanks to the campaign of Sen. Obama, who made young people a priority from day one, this problem is now being attacked from both sides, but it remains to be seen if Obama’s campaign template will become a model or an aberration this cycle.

But what exactly is a “youth” issue? And what vehicles exist – outside of the campaigns – for us to drive the policy conversation? That’s what I want to focus on today.

The term “youth issue” frequently has but one or two meanings in our political discourse – college tuition (if you are a Democrat) or Social Security (if you are a Republican). For the most part, Democrats seek to throw young people a bone occasionally by modestly increasing the Pell Grants or otherwise tinkering around the edges of skyrocketing higher education costs (a huge problem, to be sure, as young people on average graduate with $20k in debt, but by no means the only issue of concern to young voters). Democrats did take somewhat larger than usual steps to stem rising education costs this year, though the bill was far from sufficient. Meanwhile, the Republicans seek to stoke in young voters the fear that Social Security is in crisis as part of their long-term strategy to privatize the program. This is a limited view of "youth issues" to say the least.

A recent poll by Rock the Vote asked young voters to rate the issues of important to them, and this is what they found:

“Youth” issues are the same issues that concern the rest of the electorate. The costs of higher education, to be sure, are a concern, but they are not the biggest concern. Other pocket-book issues like attaining a well-paying job and acquiring health care rank higher. Digging in deeper to the economic issues, young voters are worrying about finding a job that pays well enough for them to start a family or pay off those school debts and buy a home. Their concerns on this issue are intertwined with their concerns about health care, which they see not as a separate issue, but as one of their biggest economic concerns. Thanks to the decoupling of health insurance and employment (with no government program to fill in the gap), young people in their 20’s are one of the least likely groups to have health care.

I agree with the commenters that more candidates need to be addressing these issues, and that such attention will go a long way in giving young people a greater stake in our elections and policy debates. But it’s also important for candidates and campaigns to realize that this is not difficult. Young people have very real concerns that very are similar to those of other demographics. For sure, our concerns will vary slightly. Talking about Medicare still isn’t going to cut it with us, nor is talking about the stock market (which only 3% of respondents cited as an issue of economic concern), but young people are factory workers and nurses, soldiers, school teachers, programmers – the same as anyone else just with a little less economic and health security. Speaking to our issues is not rocket science or pandering, and as the Obama campaign has admirably shown, it can pay huge dividends.

Before I end my turn here, I also want to alert the readers who were so interested in policy questions to two other groups of the [dot] Org Boom that are focused solely on getting young people into the policy discussion:

The Roosevelt Institution is a student run think tank started in 2005. Each year the group and its 7,000 members push out policy proposals, based on its “Roosevelt Challenge” program. So far, Roosevelt Challenges on living-wage issues, pay-day lending, and health care reform have been presented to the New Haven City Council, D.C. City Council and the Wisconsin Legislature.

DMI Scholars is a program of the very excellent Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City. Seeking to diversify the progressive public policy sphere, the program focuses on young people of color coming out of underserved communities, and teaches its applicants how to begin a career in public policy. The program had its first class of applicants last summer and is beginning to ramp up for its summer 2008 class.

If policy is what you are interested in, I recommend checking out these organizations.

And that’s it for me here at Table of One. Thanks to Andrew Golis and the TPM Café staff for the opportunity to blog here. I’ve had fun and I hope it was enjoyable/educational all around. If you want to find out more about what is happening in progressive youth politics, I hope you’ll pick up my new (and first) book – Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voter’s Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority – and help a blogger pay off his own student loans. I also blog about youth politics regularly at Future Majority. I hope you’ll stop by.