The under-45s opt out
of political loop

If you are old enough to remember Frank Zappa, then you should recall his famous quote about journalists:

"Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read."

The baby boom generation may be able to read and there are certainly enough people to write for them, but it is questionable if anyone else is listening.

Because the young vote at an abysmally low rate, political operatives already know to pitch their campaigns at the middle- class, 45-and-older crowd.

Here's a new report from Martin Wattenberg, a University of California at Irvine political scientist, who argues that besides the campaign, even the rhetoric of governing is skewed to the oldsters.

Wattenberg tracks the slide in public attention to presidential speeches and weaves through it the decline in attention to the news media in general.

The numbers show that in 1971 more than half of the nation watched a speech by President Nixon on Vietnam, while last year just 20 percent of the nation viewed President Bush ask for $87 billion to pursue the war in Iraq.

It goes without saying that the nation's voters haven't been clicking off the news because they were so wrapped up in the daily paper, because readership has also dropped from 69 percent in Nixon's time to 40 percent now. Remember, it was Bush who said last year that he didn't read newspapers. The percentage of those who watch the network news has slipped from 58 percent to 32 percent.

Lectures and editorials about voter apathy have become enough of a cliché that no one blinks. In Hawaii, the lack of voters isn't a cliché, it is a way of life. Two years ago we scored with two national lows, lowest percentage of registered voters and lowest percentage of registered voters who bothered to vote.

While Hawaii could find the time to tune in and vote during "American Idol," actual voting in a real election was something done by only 41 percent of the registered voters.

Here is the catch in all this disinterest, as reported by Wattenberg's research on presidential speeches:

"Presidential pronouncements were once a shared national experience. The current generation of young people is the first to grow up in a media environment in which there are few such shared experiences.

"Young people have never known a time when most citizens paid attention to major political events," Wattenberg said.

Politicians, whatever you might think about their brain power, are smart enough to know who is listening to them. If kids aren't listening, politicians won't bother to speak to them, nor will they aim their policies or their decisions at the young.

The key to political power is the power to communicate. If the nation's or state's leader is a great communicator with a message that is only reaching a portion of the population, such as boomers and senior citizens, the job of satisfying just that group at the expense of those who don't pay attention, is all the easier.