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t r u t h o u t Issues: Left Follows the Right on Campus Outreach Path, by Cynthia H. Cho

Democrats are finally waking up to the importance of mobilizing university students. The GOP has spent large sums of money and time doing exactly this in the last three decades; with the vituperative Ann Coulter and the slimy Karl Rove being the obvious results. --- Annamarie


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Left Follows the Right on Campus Outreach Path
By Cynthia H. Cho
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 24 July 2005

Democrats watched the GOP mobilize young voters to win in 2004. Now, liberals turn to college networks to try to match its success.
Washington - When Kimberly Teplitzky and Geoff Aung attended the College Republican National Convention in Arlington, Va., last month, they avoided talking about political issues with their fellow conventioneers.

"We didn't want to scare them away," Teplitzky said.

Teplitzky and Aung - who voted for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in the 2004 presidential election - are interns at Campus Progress, a new division of the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. They were, to say the least, out of place at the GOP event.

"We didn't want to give ourselves away right away," Teplitzky said. "But when they asked, we told them who we were."

The point of going to the convention, she said, was to "see what they are doing, hear what they are saying and to find out what their priorities are."

In short, the two were there to learn from the successes of their political opposites.

Nearly invisible on college campuses a generation ago, conservatives have made a concerted effort over the last three decades to groom students as future political leaders - with considerable success.

Now, liberals have started taking pages from that playbook; Campus Progress was formed in February to, as its website says, "counter the growing influence of right-wing groups" on college campuses.

That was a hot topic this month at Campus Progress' first National Student Conference, where speakers included former President Bill Clinton, CNN political analyst Paul Begala and Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? More than 600 college students from across the country gathered for what organizers called a "one-day crash course that explores progressive student leadership."

"Conservatives are trying harder to hook students," said David Halperin, the group's executive director. They are "taking a group of students and giving them the tools to succeed. With the resources, the training and the skills they have been taught, they can win. They win with smaller numbers."

Though Campus Progress admires the conservatives' success, "we don't want to emulate everything they do," Halperin said. "We'll take things that are effective."

What has been effective, both conservative and liberals agree, is spending money and time on efforts to reach college students. Ron Robinson, president of the conservative Young America's Foundation, said that in 2004, major conservative groups spent about $35 million on outreach to college students - raised largely through private donors. Young America's budget last year was about $15 million.

Halperin said it was harder to gauge how much money liberals spent on similar initiatives; his group's budget for 2005, its first year, was about $700,000. Outreach to college students is a small part of the mission of many liberal groups, like the Sierra Club and People for the American Way. Because most such organizations form around issues, rather than demographics, liberal students have more difficulty getting support.

Ralph G. Neas, head of People For the American Way, said that was starting to change. A priority for his organization is helping to develop a progressive movement nationwide. "To do that, you need to recognize the need to cultivate the next generation of young leaders," he said.

This year, the organization selected 126 student leaders from 40 colleges for its 2005 Young People For fellowship program. "We put together [the fellowship program] to identify these leaders now and provide them with the resources they need to flourish," Neas said.

At a summit in January, the students were taught how to educate their college peers about progressive issues.

Neas said the right wing had been making those connections for years, "building what really is a farm system - going to the campuses, cultivating and training people, finding them jobs and internships." He said Young People For, formed 15 months ago, intended to make a comparable commitment to help ensure the progressive movement's long-term success.

Conservatives have several well-established organizations that specialize in reaching out to and training young people. The Young America's Foundation sponsors lectures - more than 500 last year - and conferences throughout the country. More than 400 young people are expected at the foundation's weeklong conference, beginning July 31, for college students, where the scheduled speakers include former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, author Ann Coulter and Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith.

Keisha Senter, speakers bureau coordinator for Campus Progress, said that progressive student groups didn't always have the money or connections to bring leading progressive speakers to their campuses. She sees her role within Campus Progress as changing that.

"We're trying to build a speakers bureau," Senter said. "We want to be a hub where students can request [speakers] and we'll bring them, free of charge."

For last week's Campus Progress conference, she snagged a big name for the keynote address: Clinton.

The former president urged students to be politically active. "You don't have to wait until your party is in power," he told them. The Democrats are "in better shape than it appears" to win political seats, Clinton said - but to do so, liberals must discard the belief that talking to conservatives is "selling out."

"We can talk to Red America - and there's no absence of conviction," he said.

People will not vote for candidates who do not reach out to them, Clinton said, so "there can be no person we do not see."

In some respects, Campus Progress is playing catch-up. The Leadership Institute, a prominent conservative training organization, has offered seminars and workshops for college students since 1979, and has had particular success in preparing young people to become political leaders.

"From 1979 to today, I don't think that there has been more than one College Republican National Committee chairman who did not graduate from one of the Leadership Institute programs," said Morton C. Blackwell, the institute's president and founder.

Paul Gourley, who was elected chairman of the College Republicans on June 26, attended several sessions of the Youth Leadership School, one of the institute's many training programs.

"I wouldn't be where I am today without the Leadership Institute," Gourley said. "It taught me everything I needed to know about youth politics."

Students who graduated from the Leadership Institute's Student Publications School have founded more than 20 publications on college campuses.

Now Campus Progress has started supporting campus publications. The organization has given grants of $500 to $3,000 to 14 student publications at colleges across the country, including USC, Harvard University and Dartmouth College.

With a grant from Campus Progress, Nathan Dickerson and Yuriy Bronshteyn helped found The Colonel, a satirical publication at the University of Kentucky. Its mission is to "scrutinize ... policymaking through a brutally honest and sometimes irreverent voice."

Dickerson and Bronshteyn, who will be juniors in the fall, attended the National Student Conference in part to meet other students like them.

"I wanted to coordinate with other progressive minds," Dickerson said.

Providing networking opportunities such as this month's conference is an important goal of Campus Progress.

"I think something is happening here," Halperin said. "Something more than the free food and President Clinton."

That groups on both sides of the aisle are targeting college students shouldn't be a surprise.

"Anybody who has a long view realizes that ... working with young people has a great payout over a long period of time: They are going to be around for a generation," said Blackwell, who took Karl Rove, then a College Republican activist at the University of Utah, under his wing in 1969 and recommended him for a Senate campaign staff in Illinois in 1970.

Rove, of course, went on to become President Bush's chief political strategist.

Halperin noted that the work conservatives did decades ago had come to fruition. "That's how you have people like Ann Coulter and Karl Rove now," he said.

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posted by Annamarie at 7:18 PM