[lbo-talk] Dems v. pop culture

Shane Taylor s-t-t at juno.com
Wed Jul 9 09:46:11 PDT 2003


Youth Hostile To win over young voters, Democrats need to stop trashing popular culture. By Danny Goldberg

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/7/goldberg-d.html

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The Democratic entertainment bashing continued with the Media Marketing Accountability Act, co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Herb Kohl. Not a single Republican signed on to the bill. Some say this syndrome is a reaction to the enormous defeat of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, in which the candidate's image was commingled with various 1960s protest and cultural movements. "Don't get stuck in the '60s," snapped Sen. Barbara Boxer at a friend of mine who'd complained about Lieberman's selection as Gore's running mate in 2000. As Tom Hayden sardonically says, culture bashing has become "the cultural equivalent of a drug test. As if they're saying, 'I have been cleansed of the '60s because I have attacked those lyrics.'" Besides being morally dubious, this is politically irrational. Why lump everything from the '60s together? Violent groups such as the Weathermen were very unpopular with millions of the very same people who loved the Beatles and romanticized Woodstock.

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What can the Democrats do to win back their youth and pop-culture base in 2004? They can start by not putting Joe Lieberman on the national ticket. An oft-quoted section of his campaign book, _In Praise of Public Life_, claims that "traditional sources of values in our society -- such as faith, family, and school -- are in a life and death struggle with the darker forces of immorality," referring specifically to the "entertainment culture." Moreover, Lieberman is just too conservative across the board, and more so now than he was in 2000. Millions of otherwise Democratic voters would abstain from a Lieberman-Bush contest. As TV comedian Jon Stewart described him, "Joe Lieberman is for people who really want to vote for George Bush -- but think he's not Jewish enough."

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