Conducted by Matthew Ellison

David Halperin is Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress and the Director of Campus Progress, the Center’s dynamic effort to strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses
nationwide and empower new generations of leaders.

According to your official biography, you are the Director of Campus Progress, the Center for American Progress’s dynamic effort to strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses nationwide and empower new generations of leaders. How do you go about doing this?

We think the most important thing is to give young people support for projects that they’re interested in and that they started. Every aspect of what we do has a local dimension as well as a national one. Our programs are in activism, journalism, and events. In each of those we support local work, student campaigns on issues that are local to their campuses or their communities, student publications on more than 50 campuses already, and events that students themselves devise and want to run. We also do a lot at the national level on issues that we think are important to young people nationwide, but the most important thing is to invest in the things that young people themselves are starting.

As you know, young voters vote in much smaller numbers than older voters. Do you think more young people will vote in 2008?

All the research shows that young people voted in greater numbers in 2004 and 2006 than they had in past elections in recent decades. Research and new surveys suggest that young people will continue that trend and increase turnout because I think the younger generation is particularly engaged and because they see how much is at stake in this election.

An issue that affects a lot of college students who want to vote, especially at Yale, is where to vote. Do you think students should register to vote at home or at school?

I think that’s really a personal choice for students. States and localities should make it easy and attractive for citizens and people in their communities to vote rather than putting up barriers and worrying about who is going to vote and whether this or that person in power is going to get outvoted.

Politically, how do you think Yale is different now than it was when you were a student here in the 1980s?

I think that political activism and political engagement come and go. I was a student when Ronald Reagan was president and you saw, sort of shockingly, for the first time a vocal and rather well-organized group of campus conservatives. That was something that really made its mark. I don’t think that their numbers were that great. I think students even then tilted strongly toward the progressive side, but conservatives invested in campuses and helped those conservative students that were there to have the tools they needed to make their voices heard. That’s something that progressives had not done, and that’s what we’re trying to do with Campus Progress and some of the partner organizations we work with make a much stronger effort to take those students who are interested in progressive politics and the progressive agenda and give them more resources and tools and connections so they can get things done more effectively.

In October, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman praised the optimism and idealism of young people but criticized our lack of radicalism and political engagement. Friedman writes: “Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way – by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that – virtual.” Do you think this is an accurate portrayal of college students, and how can it, or for that matter, should it, be changed?

I do agree that I would love to see more students making their voices heard in public, especially on issues like the Iraq War, which has been an outrage for four years now, a totally misguided policy that has weakened our national security—a huge mistake by the president. Where was the outrage? Where’s the outrage on over the denials and inaction that have characterized policy on global warming? Where’s the outrage over handing all the money in the treasury to rich people who don’t need the money while working people are struggling to feed their families? I would like to see more public engagement and more protesting in front of congressional offices. But I do think that Mr. Friedman is wrong to just sniff at the more sophisticated organizing and networking that go on because I believe those things can have an effect. Some of the new student organizing is more corporate. Instead of just throwing stones or taking over a building, they start a nonprofit organization and name themselves and their friends to the board; it looks more corporate, but some of that stuff may work. It may work on Sudan; it may work on global warming. That kind of organizing is okay with me so long as the people are committed and actually achieve some results. I’m less concerned with the form of it than with whether it delivers, and I think we ought to give those kinds of activists and organizing a chance as well.

Are there any issues that you think are not being discussed enough in the presidential campaign that are of particular importance to young voters?

I think the overall issue of young people’s economics—whether you’re going to be the first generation in many generations to not do as well as your parents—is important. More than half of college students move back into their parents’ houses after they graduate. Whether you can afford your own place and whether you can afford to get married have become serious concerns. The fact that states have cut money for educational aid and that the federal government (until recently with historic legislation that was just passed) had been cutting more from educational aid made it more likely that family income was a key determining factor in whether you could go to college. The availability of health care is another key issue. The country is moving in the wrong direction economically, and that will affect young people whether they graduate from Yale or don’t go to college at all; that is a big issue that ought to be addressed more. We found, truthfully, that it’s hard to get young people activated and mobilized on the issue of college affordability, I think in part because either their parents are paying or they’re borrowing the money to pay back later and don’t think about it. If we could organize a group of people in their twenties, those are the people whose bills have come due for paying for their education, and they’re the ones who I think could have a bigger impact. There are a bunch of issues I think of, and the war is not expressed strongly enough as an issue that has destroyed our budget, distorted our foreign policy, and weakened us in the fight against terrorism. That’s one that ought to be emphasized more and does affect young people because you’ll be paying for that war for the rest of your lives, as well as the issues of global warming and energy independence. This is a campaign where the issues are still yet to be defined. I think the most important issues for me are whether the country is making itself safer and helping to build peace in the world or making things more dangerous for our people and everybody else and whether we are building an economy where there is opportunity for people to succeed and that could allow our country to continue providing economic leadership for our people and for the world.

Barack Obama’s Facebook profile has over 250,000 supporters, while Hillary Clinton is a distant second with just over 77,000. While this is admittedly a crude polling device, it is clear that young voters strongly support Obama. Why do you think this is? 

I think Obama is young, or the youngest. I like to think he’s young because he’s not much older than me. I think it’s because he has a new approach, which does, to some extent, look beyond partisanship and more toward an independent view of things. I just think he brings a sort of vitality and energy. I worked for Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, a very different candidate from Obama, but he appealed to a lot of young people as well. The thing, to me, and Governor Dean has remarked on this too, that people like the most is a certain sense of realness, that the candidate is genuine and appears to be standing up for what he believes in. There are going to be exceptions to that, but I think something that young voters and young people do like about Barack Obama is the sense that he’s genuine, that he’s telling you the truth. But a lot of other people are inspired by Hillary Clinton and her lifelong commitment to the rights of women and families and her serious concern with all the issues and her mastery of the issues, and so I think there are plenty of young people for her as well as for John Edwards and other candidates.

How would you rate the presidential campaigns in targeting the youth vote?

Emily Hawkins, who worked for Campus Progress for me until recently, is Hillary Clinton’s Youth Outreach Director, so I rate her very highly because she’s terrific. Hans Reimer, who worked at Rock the Vote, is directing the effort for Obama, and he’s also very good, as are the people for John Edwards as well and people for the other campaigns. They are making more of an effort this time than in the past because they realize that with the election this close, you can say that the youth voters turn out in smaller numbers, but they’re growing as a bloc, and anything you can do to find an advantage anywhere could end up affecting the outcome in both the primary and the general election. So I do see them making a much more serious effort. I think efforts that they and other groups like Rock the Vote are making to get more young people to be a factor in the Iowa caucuses, which have traditionally not been something that young people have participated in, are particularly interesting. I think that can be a really interesting factor come January when people caucus in Iowa.

You were a speechwriter for Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign. Based on that experience, what advice would you have for the 2008 candidates?

There were certain things in the Dean campaign that we didn’t do well. We didn’t anticipate that when Governor Dean said on a Canadian television show that the Midwest caucuses were dominated by special interests it would not resonate well in Iowa. We didn’t do well in realizing that when you send people from out-of-state to meet face-to-face with Iowans, they should have a better sense of what people in Iowa are concerned about. There wasn’t the connection there that there should have been. I still learned that you can get a lot of attention for a campaign if your candidate really is on a mission, really believes in change, and really talks about his experience coming from outside D.C., and not being wed to the business-as-usual, special interest world of Washington. I think, in the end, people weren’t comfortable with Governor Dean as a package, but they would have preferred that outsider candidate. Again and again, you look at who’s elected president: it’s not the senator from Washington who learns to speak like a senator, it’s the governor who has run something and seems to bring newness. The thing that people rejected again and again is Washington, so as much as I love the candidates for president running this time, I do think that both parties ought to think about that historical experience. We’ve had one sitting senator elected president in a hundred years, and that was John F. Kennedy.

I’m going to put you on the spot here. Who do you think the nominees from both parties will be, and who do you think will win the general election?

If I had to predict today, I would predict Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani and that Giuliani would win the election. But I hope to learn a lot in the next few months, and I think we’ll see some surprises. I thought Mitt Romney actually had the better chance than Giuliani, but I changed my mind about that. I do think Obama is the only one who really can give Hillary Clinton a fight and potentially could win. Giuliani’s a tough opponent. I used to think Giuliani had no chance, but the more I go to bars and sit on airplanes and meet people, the more I see that people think of him as a tough fighter who will do what’s necessary and all that kind of stuff. I think personally he would be a rather divisive figure who wouldn’t do well for the country, but I see a lot of reasons that he’s gathering strength.

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