West Virginia. 

Then NARAL.  Edwards.  Lots of new supers.  Boom.  Obama strikes back.  Hard.

If Senator Clinton doesn't announce a new round of new money in the next few days, this could be over very soon.  As I wrote the other day, it really is all about the money now. 

Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, continue to get a great deal of pick-up in the press.

Frank Rich cites their work in an op-ed for the New York Times:

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The two authors were also recently featured on PBS's NewsHour, where they were interviewed by Judy Woodruff.

More and more, the importance of the Millennial generation is becoming generally accepted as its impact is being felt in this election cycle. It's a demographic group that we at NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been interested in. You can find some of the work we have done on this topic here and here.

NDN's softball team has its first regular season game in an hour or so. Oh, and John Edwards is endorsing Barack Obama tonight in Grand Rapids, MI at 7pm. More from Ben Smith at the Politico. But clearly the big news is that the Trotters are making their return to the fieldi!

(Just indulge us.)

From the AP:

NEW YORK (AP) - Democrat Barack Obama has won the endorsement of NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion rights advocacy organization that has supported rival Hillary Rodham Clinton throughout her political career.

The organization was set to announce the endorsement of its political action committee on Wednesday.

...

[NARAL officials] said the board decided to back Obama over Clinton because he is overwhelmingly favored to win the nomination and to heal what the organization viewed as a growing rift between black voters and white female activists that the protracted Clinton-Obama contest may have caused.

Continuing the Colbert theme, Andrei Cherny, a great friend of NDN's and a member of our extended family, will be appearing on The Colbert Report tomorrow night to promote his new book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour. Check local listings for times.

The book has been doing really well so far, but a sit down with Mr. Colbert is always interesting, so wish Andrei luck and be sure to tune in.

(via Huffington Post) In the clip below, Stephen Colbert shows us that Bill O'Reilly isn't the only one who lost their temper on camera a few years back.

Just to clarify: Ron Burgundy would have never done that.

- The Chicago Tribune's blog, The Swamp, picked up Newsday's article by Craig Gordon and Glenn Thrush, asking, "Clinton-Obama 'dream team:' nightmare?"  Simon weighed in, saying, "If Senator Obama is the nominee, it will be a very serious option that he has to give serious consideration to," says Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic party operative in Washington. "She's won a lot of delegates, she's raised a lot of money, she would bring a lot to the ticket."  (5/09/08)

- The Detroit News' Gordon Trowbridge detailed U.S. Sen. and presidential candidate Barack Obama's newly minted 50-state voter registration drive.  Simon offered his thoughts in "Obama pushes voter drive." (5/09/08)

- Simon talked superdelegates with Newsweek's Jonathan Alter in "Now on to 'Florigan!'" (5/10/08)

- The Huffington Post's Sam Stein talked to Simon about the Obama "bitter" comments in "Before Bitter-Gate: What Obama Said Hours Earlier About Guns."  In the article, Simon noted that, "The Obama campaign was able to use the gas tax issue to pivot and talk about the broader struggles of everyday people and they were able to do it in a way that had previously been hard to them... whatever happened in those magic hours when they produced those spots, they made it abundantly clear that Sen. Obama understood what the average voter was going through."

Rock the Vote just came out with a nice two-page fact sheet that lays out the essential numbers behind the surge in turnout for young people in the 2008 campaign. We’ve been talking a lot about this phenomenon, and we had a Rock the Vote person speak at our day-long event last Friday, but sometimes it’s nice to look at the cold, hard facts.

• Young people from age 18 to 29 have doubled their numbers in the presidential primaries this year. This is the combined number of all youth in both parties and is measured against the last competitive primary (2004 for Dems and 2000 for Republicans).
• If you look at individual state numbers, some of the states tripled the turnout of young people, and no state with valid numbers showed less than a 40 percent increase.

So you may say that, sure, youth turned out, but so did all kinds of groups. However, youth increased their turnout by much more than any age group. This is measured by the all-important percentage “share” of the electorate. If you consider all ages taking a slice of the pie of the electorate, the Millennial Generation’s slice grew by taking more of the pie from the slices of the other age groups.

• In the average of all Democratic primaries, youth went from 10 percent of the 2004 primaries to 14 percent of the 2008 ones.
• In every single state that held a Democratic primary so far, the youth “share” of the electorate went up. In Iowa, they went as high as 22 percent of the electorate.  Almost a quarter of all voters were Millennials there, in the state that started Obama’s rise.

The Republican numbers for increases in share of the youth vote are less dramatic, and in a few states they did not increase, but nevertheless, the general trend is playing out there too. Youth of all ideological stripes are more engaged in politics than we have seen in a long time, though that is particularly true on the Democratic and progressive side.

We at the New Politics Institute have been promoting this important constituency for years and it is incredibly gratifying to see this playing out so dramatically on the ground and so graphically in the numbers.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute

Update: Farm Bill conference report now available --http://agriculture.senate.gov. The conference report is expected to be considered this week by both the Senate and House before being sent to the White House.

With respect to trade and the Farm Bill, U.S. farm subsidies are usually the topic du jour. But this week the House Ways and Means Committee is making a special effort to highlight other trade-related provisions in the Farm Bill. These provisions are not terribly exceptional, and have been circling the trade world for a while now, but it is interesting to note how House Democrats are marketing them -- as tools that can help not just to alleviate poverty (the standard argument) but to ease the global food crisis and ensuing riots in some parts of the world.  Global prices of staple foods have risen more than 40 percent in the past year and world stocks are at their lowest since the early 1980s.  Kudos for Ways and Means for seeing the linkages between trade and the food crisis and working with the Ag Committee to add these new trade provisions that specifically target poorer countries. 

House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel on the Farm Bill's trade preferences provisions:

The Farm Bill should promote nutrition and enhance food access at home and abroad. You can’t always spread democracy with a rifle and this bill improves on existing measures to address the crisis in Haiti caused by rising food prices and persistent poverty. By extending and strengthening provisions that would soon expire, we can help give a sense of certainty to investors to continue the economic growth and development we have built in the Caribbean region, while creating new opportunities for American workers, farmers and businesses.

This year's Farm Bill includes additional trade preferences for Haiti that relax and expand the HOPE Act's rules for duty-free treatment of Haitian apparel. These rules also create incentives to use U.S. imputs, thereby providing new opportunities for American workers, farmers, and businesses. According to Ways and Means, these additional preferences will help Haitian industry attract new investment and create immediate jobs, and generate income to help workers pay for increased food costs and other necessities.

The Farm Bill also extends the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) for new two years. CBI provides preferences for textiles, apparel, and other goods, and has helped to raise the living standards and strengthened the economies of several Caribbean nations. Current CBI preferences are scheduled to expire on September 30, 2008.

On a related note, NDN recently endorsed the Global Poverty Act, which is designed to help the United States develop a strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015. 

As a way to set the mood for today's West Virginia Primary, I will go with the obvious choice and ask you to listen to John Denver's classic.

Today, voters from Wheeling to Weirton will head to the polls in the Mountain State from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. to allocate West Virginia's 28 delegates. At 7:45 p.m., Keith Olberman, Wolf Blitzer and Bill O'Reilly will all call the race for Senator Clinton.

Former President Bill Clinton is predicting an 80-20 victory for the Senator from New York in tonight's primary which would be relative to Huntington, WV's Thundering Herd of Marshall University's 48-23 loss last season to their upstate rival from Morgantown, the Mountaineers of West Virginia University. Chances are very good that Senator Clinton's staff will be burning their couches as is the tradition in West Virginia following a big win (or a disappointing loss).