AS GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS stepped to the mike, the young crowd whistled and cheered. “Because you voted in 1992,” Stephanopoulos said, “there are more student loans for young people. Because you voted in 1992, there are fewer guns on the streets. Because you voted in 1992, we made efforts to clean up the environment and to protect a woman’s right to choose. But in 1994, a lot of young people stayed home and you saw a Republican Congress come in led by Speaker Gingrich, who tried to take away a woman’s right to choose.”
This was the non-partisan message of a non-partisan rally organized in part by the non-partisan organization Rock the Vote, run by a former Clinton White House official and supposedly “dedicated to protecting freedom of speech, educating young people, and motivating them to speak out.” Other speakers at the rally included heartthrob Billy Baldwin and a token conservative, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, who described the event as “a Hard Rock Cafe filled with screaming 17-year-old girls who only wanted to catch a glimpse of Baldwin and Stephanopoulos.”
This was only one instance of the unabashedly leftleaning campaign of Rock the Vote to capture the next generation of voters. The organization was founded in 1990 as a vehicle to fight the arrest and prosecution of a Florida record-store owner charged with selling an outlawed 2 Live Crew album to a minor. Its founding fathers include Steve Barr, who left the organization to work for the 1992 Clinton campaign and later became chairman of the Democratic party in California; Virgin Records executive Jeff Ayeroff; and other officials of the recording industry.
In 1992, Rock the Vote began a massive campaign of public-service announcements, along with registration drives at music stores and rock and rap concerts, after President Bush vetoed the so-called motor voter bill. These efforts helped to reverse a twenty-year trend of declining political participation among 18-to24-year-olds: 42.8 percent of them voted in 1992, up from 36.2 percent in 1988. When the smoke lifted, Bush was defeated and on May 20, 1993, Bill Clinton signed the act into law, with a posse of Rock the Voters standing beside him.
Rock the Vote is best known for its splashy spots on MTV, and the ties between the organization and the cable channel go far beyond the public- service announcements featuring LL Cool J, En Vogue, R.E.M, and Aerosmith. If you call MTV for information on its own “Choose or Lose” voter-awareness scheme, the receptionist quickly suggests dialing 1800-CALL-RTV — the direct line to Rock the Vote. The two groups travel together in the cable channel’s custom-designed Choose or Lose bus.
MTV makes no secret of its Democratic bias, and that’s completely kosher; it’s a for-profit venture whose parent company’s president, Sumner Redstone, is an unabashed liberal. By contrast, Rock the Vote is non-partisan because it has to be; it receives taxdeductible donations and by law cannot endorse candidates or have a party affiliation.
Even so, at a recent Washington rally, House minority leader Richard Gephardt was introduced as “the next speaker of the House.” Gephardt was startled by the introduction and attempted to calm the raucous crowd by informing them that this was a “non-partisan, bipartisan event.” One week earlier, the only speakers confirmed for the rally were liberal Democrats Gephardt, David Bonior, Barney Frank, and Pat Schroeder, as well as a lone Republican, Howard McKeon, according to College Republican national chairman Joe Galli. “If we hadn’t done any work on our end,” Galli says, “there would have been absolutely no balance to the event.” While Galli and the Republicans did indeed help put together an impressive showing, including House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, Galli still says Rock the Vote has “a very left-leaning, liberal slant.”
Last year, the rapper and sitcom actress Queen Latifah received Rock the Vote’s highest honor, the Patrick Lippert Award. “Right now with the Congress being swung to the right,” she declared in her acceptance speech, “my generation is in a lot of trouble. We have a lot of people making decisions about us who couldn’t care less about us.”
Rock the Vote’s program director Mark Strama, who worked as a researcher for Ann Richards’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign in Texas, responded to Latifah’s remarks by saying, “As an organization, nothing we stand for prevents individuals from expressing their private opinions about policy. If she didn’t have opinions about government, she wouldn’t be the activist she is.”
Now Rock the Vote, in conjunction with Black Youth Vote, has begun a campaign to attract AfricanAmerican voters through what the two groups call a “hip-hop coalition.” Among the urban dynamos who have signed on are such radicals as Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who in the wake of the L.A. riots opined, “In an organized revolution, everybody would have gone into Hollywood and Beverly Hills and burned it down.” In February, Rock the Vote decided to celebrate Chuck D’s contributions to the community at a ceremony where he asserted that conservatives are “leaving black people bleak and in the dark. . . . The climate in America with Buchanan and Dole is saying, ‘F — black folk.'”
Queen Latifah and Chuck D, offensive as they might be, are simply performers mouthing off — celebrity front men whose knowledge of politics probably ends with the name Stephanopoulos. As Chuck D said in Public Enemy’s biggest hit, you have to “fight the powers that be,” and at Rock the Vote the power is its executive director, Ricki Seidman. Seidman’s resume reads like a fantasy of liberal and Democratic activism. As legal director for Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, she was responsible for the infamous attack-ad on the judicial record of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. She next moved to Senator Edward Kennedy’s office shortly after Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, and she is credited with pressuring the reluctant Anita Hill to come out with her harassment story. When the Judiciary Committee failed to listen, according to David Brock’s The Real Anita Hill, Seidman helped leak the story to the press. During the 1992 presidential campaign, she moved to Little Rock to help run Clinton’s war room, and after the victory she became an assistant to the president and a counselor to chief of staff Mack McLarty. She joined Rock the Vote in November 1994.
How could a political operative so utterly partisan head a non-partisan group? Seidman explains: “My biggest hobby was music, I have friends who are musicians, and I was burned out being in the White House and I wanted to do something totally different.”
Seidman, Strama, and Rock the Vote clearly comprehend the significance of the youth vote. Those in the 18-to-24-year-old range will transform the politics of the next decades; Rock the Vote has taken charge in an attempt to forge and control that destiny. It may be that 50 percent of the country’s 25 million young voters will go to the polls in 1996. With all the splash and dazzle and sleight-of-hand mise-en-scene of an MTV video, Rock the Vote is laboring mightily to bias their choice — in a non-partisan way, of course.
Ari Redbord is a student at Duke University and the publisher of the Duke Review.
