Young Voters Must Transition into an Engaged Electorate
Where’s Young Jeezy’s Anthem for the Midterm Elections?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
Back in the fall of 2008, to be young and voting age in America, meant that you were on the verge of something extraordinary. To vote for Barack Obama was the epitome of cutting edge cool. No one wanted to be on the wrong-side of history. Obama wasn’t simply going to be the first Black president, he was the first President branded for a generation for which branding (and perhaps hip-hop) was their lingua franca—their shared language across race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.
And everybody got in the act from Will.I.Am to crack rapper Young Jeezy, whose “My President is Black” had everyone—from Big Mama to Pookie and ‘dem—singing and rapping for change. Two years later there are no more anthem, Barack Obama is fighting for his political life and there’s little guarantee that those same young voters that energized the electorate will find their way to the voting booth next month.
It is perhaps easy to suggest that young voters—and quite few others—were caught up in the allure of a candidate, who in comparison to the forty-three men who held the office before him really did look like change. No doubt Barack Obama the campaigner was an open signifier able to look like everything that the electorate desired whether they were independents, the fringe Left or first time voters.
Obama’s chameleon ways have been so successful that even his political enemies believe that he’s Leftist radical; Forbes Magazine publisher and failed Presidential candidate Steve Forbes manages to describe Obama’s economic policies as “soft Socialism” in every other paragraph of the magazine.
Many times throughout the last 18 months there were more than enough opportunities for young voters to provide political pressure on President Obama—the proverbial phone calls, emails, letters to House Representatives, Senators, committee heads, and even the White House—to weigh in on every thing from the environmental crisis in the Gulf region, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his choice for Secretary of Treasury, his tepid Healthcare legislation, to the (un)forced resignation of Green Jobs Guru Van Jones and the sad and embarrassing dismissal of Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. Yet young voters seemed content to stay on the sidelines and let Obama, stand in as proxy for their concerns relieving them of rightful responsibility to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
Where’s Young Jeezy’s Anthem for the Midterm Elections?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
Back in the fall of 2008, to be young and voting age in America, meant that you were on the verge of something extraordinary. To vote for Barack Obama was the epitome of cutting edge cool. No one wanted to be on the wrong-side of history. Obama wasn’t simply going to be the first Black president, he was the first President branded for a generation for which branding (and perhaps hip-hop) was their lingua franca—their shared language across race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.
And everybody got in the act from Will.I.Am to crack rapper Young Jeezy, whose “My President is Black” had everyone—from Big Mama to Pookie and ‘dem—singing and rapping for change. Two years later there are no more anthem, Barack Obama is fighting for his political life and there’s little guarantee that those same young voters that energized the electorate will find their way to the voting booth next month.
It is perhaps easy to suggest that young voters—and quite few others—were caught up in the allure of a candidate, who in comparison to the forty-three men who held the office before him really did look like change. No doubt Barack Obama the campaigner was an open signifier able to look like everything that the electorate desired whether they were independents, the fringe Left or first time voters.
Obama’s chameleon ways have been so successful that even his political enemies believe that he’s Leftist radical; Forbes Magazine publisher and failed Presidential candidate Steve Forbes manages to describe Obama’s economic policies as “soft Socialism” in every other paragraph of the magazine.
Many times throughout the last 18 months there were more than enough opportunities for young voters to provide political pressure on President Obama—the proverbial phone calls, emails, letters to House Representatives, Senators, committee heads, and even the White House—to weigh in on every thing from the environmental crisis in the Gulf region, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his choice for Secretary of Treasury, his tepid Healthcare legislation, to the (un)forced resignation of Green Jobs Guru Van Jones and the sad and embarrassing dismissal of Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. Yet young voters seemed content to stay on the sidelines and let Obama, stand in as proxy for their concerns relieving them of rightful responsibility to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
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