McCain Campaign Suggests They're Ceding the Minority, Youth Vote

Call it “cut and run.”

The Sen. John McCain campaign is giving up on the youth vote.

And the minority vote.

And good riddance.

In a story Thursday — “In a More Diverse America, a Mostly White Convention” — The Washington Post reported McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’ description of a strategy that “essentially cedes the black vote.”

Significantly, Davis suggested McCain would cede the youth vote, too.

“We can run our campaign the way we want to run it and not be in direct conflict with a lot of voter groups [Obama] is trying to get,” he told the Post, singling out “the minority community or the youth,” as constituencies that are apparently excluded from the phrase “president of all the people.”

The hardest thing to understand about this story is The Post’s posture of surprise. Republican policies are out of step on most issues young voters care about, like the environment, the cost of college, and the war in Iraq.

And at the GOP convention in St. Paul, the rhetoric on display was squarely anti-youth.

“Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man,” Joe Lieberman sniffed.

“The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery,” Sarah Palin crowed. (Which is interesting, given recent revelations that Palin may have attended as many as six colleges in six years of postsecondary education.)

Of course, this is a party whose youth appeal is limited to the fact that most kids considering Sarah Palin’s candidacy don’t know who Tom Eagleton is.

Perhaps the most egregious offense was the convention speakers’ ludicrous mission to lampoon Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Obama passed up lucrative employment to become a social services worker and activist helping people in some of Chicago’s most hard-bitten neighborhoods.

But as the Bush Administration’s Katrina response made abundantly clear, Republicans see helping poor folks as something of a joke.

Enter Rudy Giuliani Wednesday night, chuckling like a derisive old stooge.

“He worked as a community ... organizer,” Giuliani said, guffawing at the word.

“A what?” The whole hall was laughing.

“He worked! As a community — organizer,” as if work and community service were mutually exclusive activities.

“Maybe that’s the first problem,” Giuliani said.

Palin, sure enough, kept toeing that party line.

“This world of threats and dangers is not just a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” she said.

But between Habitat for Humanity and Teach for America, the millennial generation is one of the most service-oriented. And young people today have far more in common with someone who worked as a community organizer than with someone who, like Palin, was one of the few people to come out against the Polar Bear Protection Act.

Thus far in this campaign, McCain’s gone to lengths to show he’s a new-age conservative. His ads that aired during the Olympics were geared to appeal to moderates on issues like climate change and energy independence.

But on the convention floor, Republicans were anything but moderate.

“Drill, baby, drill!” the delegates shouted, yodeling for oil like the undead for blood. If the GOP once tried to fend off accusations that they were squarely in the corners of the oil companies, it appears they have abandoned all pretension. It’s no accident, then, that the head of an oil rig is called a “tool pusher.” In lobbyists’ hands, the Republican Party is a responsive instrument.

McCain’s appeal was always that he wasn’t cynical in the same way as other politicians. That’s all changed, as GOP consultant Mike Murphy noted this week when he didn’t realize an MSNBC microphone was live. From the chants about drilling to the Giuliani speech’s video backdrop of a tower-less Lower Manhattan, Murphy couldn’t be more right — and the GOP convention couldn’t have been more crass.

Maybe Obama’s campaign didn’t do much to specifically support youth causes at the Democratic Convention.

But with the Republicans giving them up, the Dems didn’t need to lift a finger.

The above article previously appeared on the Youth Vote ’08 blog, a joint venture of the Washington Post, CBS News, and UWire. Check it out at youthvoteblog.com and youthvote.washingtonpost.com. David’s column appears there weekly.

David Wittenberg is The Sun’s associate editor. He can be contacted at associate-editor@cornellsun.com [1]. The Witt’s End appears alternate Thursdays this semester.