Will Bush Spark a Seismic Youthquake?

Out on the campaign trail, President Bush never tires of talking about how

America is facilitating "the march toward democracy" in Afghanistan and Iraq – evoking the heart-rending images of the 19-year old Afghan girl who cast the first vote in her country's recent election and of eager Iraqis preparing to do "the hard work of democracy."

What he always fails to mention is how hard we are making "the hard work of democracy" here at home – particularly for young voters.

Our voting system continues to be an unhealthy stew of wildly uneven local and state regulations that often confuse first-time voters and lead to ridiculous situations like the one in Ohio where the Republican secretary of state recently attempted to invalidate tens of thousands of new voter registration forms because they hadn't been – I kid you not – printed on thick enough paper. One of the reasons democracy is such hard work is because of the hard work so many put into suppressing it.

A new study by Harvard University shows that more than a third of colleges do not comply with a federal law requiring them to help students register to vote in the states where they are enrolled – no small matter when you consider that students represent more than one percent of the voting population in crucial swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

And when I was speaking at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, students told me about an arcane rule that held that if they changed dorms, they had changed electoral districts and had to re-register – something lots of them didn't know until they got to the polling place, by which time it was too late.

Making matters worse, a number of states have rules that can make it impossible for out-of-state college students to vote absentee, while only six states have same day voter registration, which is crucial when you consider that young voters often don't start paying attention until much closer to the election.

You have to wonder what that first-through-the-polling-place-door Afghan teen would make of all this.

If she didn't know better, she might start to wonder if the powers-that-be didn't prefer that her young American counterparts just stay home on Nov. 2 – and leave the messy business of participatory democracy to them.

The bottom line is that our leaders have done a hell of a job of narrowing the field of engaged young voters. A paltry 36 percent of 18-to-24 year olds bothered to vote in 2000.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that all indications point to a radical turnaround in young voter turnout in the coming election – a turnaround fueled by a force more powerful than all the electoral hurdles placed in young people's way.

Namely, George W. Bush.

He's sparked a youthful uprising unseen since Robert Kennedy's tragically-shortened run for president. Kennedy's 1968 campaign brought together a powerful coalition of progressive young white voters and disaffected young black voters, united in support of his twin platform of fighting poverty and ending the war in Vietnam. Bush's immoral war in Iraq and poverty-spreading domestic policies have brought those same groups together in an effort to topple him.

Bush is the photo negative of Kennedy. The anti-Bobby.

Perhaps most significantly, he has galvanized a whole generation of urban youth that had turned its back on voting. Hip hoppers who cut their teeth on Tupac Shakur's black rage anthems are now registering voters, talking electoral politics, and gearing up to help their grandmothers' friends make it to the polls in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville. A new generation of political activists has been born.

The effort to turn out young voters has been extraordinary. Both parties, their 527 supporters, as well as a wide variety of high profile, nonpartisan voter registration groups, including Rock the Vote, the New Voters Project, Declare Yourself and the Hip Hop Summit Action Network have all been aggressively pursuing new voters. Rock the Vote alone has registered more than 1.3 million people via its web site and street teams.