—D.J.R. Bruckner, 1/6/72 in the L.A. Times
Bruckner’s article was focused on the mood of Young Blacks, but unless you were reading very closely, the distinction was easy to miss. Because the mood amoung Young Whites is not much different—despite a lot of well-financed publicity about the potentially massive “youth vote.”
These are the twenty-five million or so new voters between eighteen and twenty-five—going, maybe, to the polls for the first time—who supposedly hold the fate of the nation in the palms of their eager young hands. According to the people who claim to speak for it, this “youth vote” has the power to zap Nixon out of office with a flick of its wrist. Hubert Humphrey lost in ’68 by 499,704 votes—a miniscule percentage of what the so-called “youth vote” could turn out in 1972.
But there are not many people in Washington who take this notion of the “youth vote” very seriously. Not even the candidates. The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in ’72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of twenty-five million new (potential) voters means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns ... just another big wave of new immigrants who don’t know the score yet, but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?
Why indeed? The scumbags behind this thinking are probably right, once again—but it might be worth pondering, this time, if perhaps they might be right for the wrong reasons. Almost all the politicians and press wizards who denigrate the “so-called youth vote” as a factor in the ’72 elections have justified their thinking with a sort of melancholy judgment on “the kids” themselves.
“How many will even register?” they ask. “And even then—even assuming a third of the possibles might register, how many of those will actually get out and vote?”
The implication, every time, is that the “youth vote” menace is just a noisy paper tiger. Sure, some of these kids will vote, they say, but the way things look now, it won’t be more than 10 percent. That’s the colleges; the other 90 percent are either military types, on the dole, or working people—on salary, just married, hired into their first jobs. Man, these people are already locked down, the same as their parents.
That’s the argument ... and it’s probably safe to say, right now, that there is not a single presidential candidate, media guru, or backstairs politics wizard in Washington who honestly believes the “youth vote” will have more than a marginal, splinter-vote effect on the final outcome of the 1972 presidential campaign.
These kids are turned off from politics, they say. Most of ’em don’t want to hear about it. All they want to do these days is lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna ... yeah, and just between you and me, Fred, I think it’s probably all for the best.
Among the half-dozen high-powered organizations in Washington who claim to speak for the “youth vote,” the only one with any real muscle at this point is the National Association of Student Governments, which recently—after putting together an “Emergency Conference for New Voters” in Chicago last month—brought its leadership back to D.C. and called a press conference in the Old Senate Office Building to announce the formation of a “National Youth Caucus.”
The idea, said twenty-six-year-old Duane Draper—the main organizer—was to get student-type activists into power on the local level in every state where they might be able to influence the drift of the ’72 election. The press conference was well attended. Edward P. Morgan of PBS was there, dressed in a snappy London Fog raincoat and twirling a black umbrella; the New York Times sent a woman, the Washington Post was represented by a human pencil, and the rest of the national press sent the same people they send to everything else that happens, officially, in this doomed sink-hole of a city.
As always, the “print people” stood or sat in a timid half circle behind the network TV cameras—while Draper and his mentor, Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, sat together at the front table and explained that the success of the Chicago rally had got the “youth vote” off to a running start. Harris didn’t say much; he just sat there looking like Johnny Cash while Draper, a former student body president at the University of Oklahoma, explained to the jaded press that the “youth vote” would be an important and perhaps decisive factor in this year’s election.
I came in about ten minutes late, and when question time came around I asked the same one I’d asked Allard Lowenstein at a similar press conference in Chicago: Would the Youth Caucus support Hubert Humphrey if he won the Democratic nomination?