Millennial Era

While Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's announcement that he was switching from the Republicans to the Democrats may have gratified the latter and upset the former, no one should have been surprised by it. Historically, party switching is common, indeed inevitable, at times of party realignment.

Spurred by the rise of a new large dynamic generation and the emergence of a new communication technology, realignments occur about every four decades in U.S. politics.

The most recent one began with the election of Barack Obama last November. These large political makeovers normally enthrone a new dominant national party. Beneath the surface, realignments are characterized by major shifts in the voting coalitions that support the two parties. Demographic groups and regions move to and fro between the parties. These demographic shifts, and the attendant ideological solidification of the two parties, leave some politicians, like Senator Specter, who no longer represent their party's mainstream thinking, as outliers and essentially marooned.

Faced with the prospect of almost certain defeat by a reduced and much more conservative base in next year's Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, the politically moderate Specter made the only rational choice he could and left the Republican Party.

The last previous realignment, which began with election of Richard Nixon in 1968, saw the movement of numerous Democrats, primarily Southerners, to the Republican Party. Starting with Strom Thurmond and continuing through Richard Shelby, these conservative Democrats, along with many of their constituents, saw the GOP as a more comfortable political home. But the movement between the parties wasn't only Southern, nor was it only in one direction. Conservative Colorado Democratic Senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, became a Republican and liberal Republicans like New York's John Lindsay and Don Riegle of Michigan went the other way.

If history is any guide, Arlen Specter's move from the Republican to the Democratic column will not be the last during the next several years. Other moderate Republicans, most likely from New England, the Northeast, and the upper Midwest, will almost certainly join him. At some point, it is also probable that a smaller number of conservative Democrats, who feel uncomfortable or politically threatened by President Obama's activist agenda, will find the GOP more compatible with their beliefs and fortunes. Just as the baseball offseason is a time for trading players, a political realignment leads to changes in the rosters of the two parties. Let the switching begin.

This week was an important week for NDN in the policy and legislative arenas as a top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation based on one of NDN's key initiatives, a proposal by NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Rob Shapiro to use the nation's infrastructure of community colleges to provide free computer training to all comers wishing to improve their IT skills. The proposal is targeted toward improving the computer skillls of U.S. workers in the increasingly globalized economy.

U.S. Rep. John Larson (CT-01), Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, today introduced the legislation, H.R. 2060, on Thursday at a news conference with Shapiro.

The Community College Technology Access Act of 2009 is based on a paper Shapiro wrote in 2007, Tapping the Resources of America’s Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Computer Training. During the presidential campaign, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama endorsed the idea as part of his platform.

National Journal's Tech Daily Dose previewed the news conference and a good write-up in Community College Times.

On Wednesday, Nelson Cunningham, newly named Chair of NDN's Latin American Policy Initiative, made a splash in the Chicago Tribune with a major essay focused on President Obama's recent trip to the Summit of the Americas. Look for more commentary for Nelson, widely seen as one of the foremost experts on U.S.-Latin American relations in the United States.

Earlier in the week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which dramatically expands the national service corps. NDN Fellows and Millennial Makover co-authors, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, wrote a special essay to mark the occasion and did several interviews. Check out this fantastic piece by Susan Milligan in the Boston Globe, Kennedy's hometown paper, which quotes Morley and Mike, who finished the East Coast leg of their book tour last week. 

Their essay -- which also was cross posted by FutureMajority -- focused on the Millennials Generation's desire to serve and its identity as a "civic" generation. Morley and Mike also received a prominent mentioned on pollster.com.

NDN is always the place to go to talk new tools and media. When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his gubernatorial run last week via all new media, Carla Marinucci from the San Franciso Chronicle asked Simon to weigh in:

"The way that Gavin Newsom announced will become standard practice in the post-Obama era of politics," said Simon Rosenberg, who heads NDN, which studies Democratic policy issues. "We're seeing a reinventing of politics ... and in a state as wired as California, and a campaign as expensive as this one will be, the candidates who can figure out how to tap into the power and passion of their supporters will have an advantage."

And Morley and Mike talked to the Providence (RI) Phoenix about the Internet and new media. The take-away: while Rhode Island still has many older, non-Internet users, Ocean State politicians who ignore new tools and media do so at their own peril.