How the left lost teen spirit (Rats need Hollywood to win youth vote)

Salon ^ | June 17, 2003 | By Andrew O'Hehir

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How the left lost teen spirit

Bill Clinton won the youth vote. Al Gore split it with George Bush. Will Democrats realize they must embrace pop culture, not demonize it, to win back the White House?

- - - - - - - - - - - - By Andrew O'Hehir

June 17, 2003 | Danny Goldberg might be the demon who haunts Bill O'Reilly and Rupert Murdoch's nightmares, even after the visage of Hillary Rodham Clinton has faded. In his new book, "Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit," the veteran music executive proudly confesses to being a quintessential Hollywood liberal (even if he moved back to New York, his birthplace, several years ago).

He did drugs in the '60s (and most definitely inhaled). He counts Barbra Streisand, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among his personal friends. He opposed the war on drugs, the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's tax cuts. He is not merely a "card-carrying member" of the American Civil Liberties Union, but for many years played a key role in its activist, publicity-savvy Southern California chapter. Goldberg has met and consulted with every significant Democratic presidential candidate of the last two decades -- and, at least at times, has helped leverage significant amounts of Hollywood money, probably the most important source of left-wing campaign dollars. In what must be one of the odder couplings in cultural history, he introduced Ralph Nader to Patti Smith, thus helping make possible the packed Madison Square Garden rally that was probably the high-water mark of Nader's controversial 2000 presidential campaign.

Goldberg's book is a fascinating memoir of the nexus where pop culture and left-wing politics collided throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s, and a cautionary tale directed at his own generation, the middle-class liberals of the baby boom who he fears are in danger of becoming their own intolerant parents. Perhaps in an effort to cleanse themselves of the cultural taint of the '60s, Goldberg speculates, Democratic middle-roaders like the Gores and, more recently and forcefully, Al's 2000 running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, have gone to considerable trouble to alienate themselves from contemporary youth and popular culture, sometimes by endorsing patently ludicrous attacks on constitutionally protected speech. These center-left moralists, themselves products of the tremendous cultural upheavals of the '60s and '70s, seem to believe, as Goldberg puts it, that pop culture was brought here by evil aliens and isn't actually, well, popular.

As Goldberg points out -- and no other political pundit, to my knowledge, has noticed this -- in 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 19 points among voters under 24. In 2000, George W. Bush and Gore were dead even in that age group, a total of about 9 million votes. Restore even half of Clinton's '96 edge with youth, and the result of the election is clearly different, with or without the much-debated Nader factor.

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Very true...of the top 5, I believe that no less than three are Italian, and the others are German and Chinese, respectively.