Obama's moment also belongs to young voters

WASHINGTON — For millions of young voters, President-elect Barack Obama s victory was a clarion call to put aside the cynicism and disaffectedness that had defined Generations X and Y and help change the course of the nation.

Their response was a resounding: ‘Yes, we can!’

Throughout the long campaign, a multiethnic coalition of millions of iPhone-wielding, Facebook-friending, tech-savvy, Twittering young voters used all the tools in their arsenal to convince friends, strangers and — yes, even their baby boomer parents — to vote for Obama.

During the next few days, thousands of those young voters will crowd into Washington-bound buses, pile into cars and sleep on the living room floors of friends, family and folks they’ve met through social networking sites — all for an opportunity to witness Obama’s inauguration.

This moment — his moment — belongs to the young, and they plan on taking a firm grip on the torch.

"My generation is the transition between the old ways of thinking and a more progressive period," said James Baker, 21, a junior political science major at the University of California, Davis. "The past election has demonstrated that young people, if they did vote, they could have a huge impact. That's something people never gave my generation credit for before."

According to exit polls, roughly 68 percent of voters age 18 to 30 voted for Obama.

The political landscape, however, was strewn with failed candidates who'd counted on young voters to propel them to victory, said John McNulty, an assistant professor of political science at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

"This tends to be a special conceit on the Democratic side of the aisle," McNulty said. "Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Jerry Brown, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy — all of these candidates, to various degrees, hoped campus activism and the youth vote would vault them to upset victories in the Democratic presidential primaries. Not one of them made it work."

However, Obama's forward-looking perspective, uncontaminated by the baby boom generation's fixation on the cultural struggles of the 1960s, resonated with younger voters.

"Perhaps since Obama is from a generation too young to have been immersed in the cauldron of Vietnam and Watergate, he sees the youth vote with clearer eyes," McNulty said.

For the generation that came of age during the prosperous 1990s, the nation's current economic downturn was a stark wake-up call, said Larry Berman, who's Baker's political science professor at UC-Davis. Many young voters will be entering the job market, or attempting to change employment, at a time when jobs are scarce.

In Obama, young voters see an agent of change, someone who could help them fulfill those hopes and aspirations, Berman said.

"In my entire 33 years of teaching at UC, I've never seen students more motivated or more informed than they were in this election. Compare it to the 2000 election with Al Gore, where there was no real sense of identification, no motivation. This time what you noticed was excitement," Berman said.