She had on one of those ironic, hipster t-shirts, whose invocation to “D.A.R.E to Keep Your Kids off Drugs” vied with her breasts for attention. I pressed my lips against hers and inhaled deeply, too deeply for my virgin lungs. I turned red from equal parts coughing and embarrassment. It wasn’t my idea to build a water pipe out of a mannequin clad in an anti-drug slogan, but it seemed funny at the time. And though I never became and don’t plan on becoming a pothead, I still find it funny.

In this month’s issue of In These Times, Ana Marie Cox (editor of the blog Wonkette!) turns her inventive prose towards a series of similarly misguided efforts to market civic virtue. In “Pimping the Vote”, she examines the recent brouhaha over the Urban Outfitters t-shirt that declared, “Voting is for old people.” “It’s funny,” she explains, “because it’s true. If anything, the mere existence of the shirt — to say nothing of its sales — suggests a level of acknowledgement of the democratic process one wouldn’t expect from a demographic more likely to vote for an American Idol than an American president.” Where most see alienated youth culture, Cox sees a new brand of civic engagement. She then contrasts this with the myriad get out the youth vote efforts, which have emerged this election cycle. After a series of cheap, though entertaining, shots at Smackdow Your Vote, Declare Yourself, Hip-Hop Action Summit Network and Rock the Vote, she cuts to the chase and asks, “Is there a way to make voting appeal to 18-year-olds that doesn’t depend on making voting seem cool?” Must we endure perrenial visits from Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No” ghost?    

While I’m with her for every step of her diagnostic, she loses me with her remedy. “Maybe we should stop trying to make voting cool,” argues Cox. “We should just show kids what happens when they don’t. In other words, we need to get them to watch the news.” I agree that it’s important for us to do a better job showing young people the opportunity costs of not voting. But increased news watching is a vague solution to say the least. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that more news watching would not help. What’s the vision here? A society of bloggers? A world where “Meet the Press” has higher ratings than 10-year-old “Friends” reruns?

Watching the news is not enough; we need to make the news. Rather than focusing on voting every four years, which panders as much as any stump speech, we need to focus on civic participation in the non-election years and at all levels of government, not just the White House. Its not just about whether the medium is cool or not, its a question of targeting the problem at a scale to which young citizens can relate. Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, but the most direct route to the voting booth may be miles from the polling station. I’m right there with Cox, yearning for civic marketing that doesn’t feel the need to be cool, but her lack of solutions makes me empathize with all the less-than-perfect GOTV efforts. Though misguided, at least they’re trying.    

Benjamin Helphand