The Gen X Political Meltdown : Remember the Big Deal Over the MTV Vote and the Twentysomething Lobbyists Storming Washington With Their Own Political Agenda? Good, Because All That’s Left Are Memories. Like Some of Their Older Fellow Citizens, They’re Fed Up With Washington.

“I never wanted to speak for a generation.” So says Rob Nelson as he sips iced tea in a Capitol Hill restaurant. It’s what you might expect from a savvy, earnest and somewhat self-proclaimed leader of the generation branded with a nihilistic X. Fresh off his motorcycle with tousled hair and wearing jeans, a gray T-shirt and hiking boots, Nelson, 31, is reflecting--a bit defensively--upon the past three years of his life, which were devoted to rousing twentysomethings to political action. He is the co-founder of Lead . . . or Leave, which last fall was billing itself as the “largest Generation X political organization in the United States.”

Yet at this moment, the start of the summer, the group he created with Jon Cowan, another 20ish Washingtonian, is short of cash, basically without a staff and struggling to stay afloat--all at a time when official Washington is debating the fiscal issues that Lead . . . or Leave used in trying to rally its generation.

The group has obsessively assailed the deficit as the greatest threat facing the Xers and has zealously bashed what it considers to be the budget-busting excesses of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But in the middle of the congressional budgetary squall, Lead . . . or Leave is nowhere to be found. Nelson knows the temptation is irresistible: to write off his group with a dismissive “so much for the slacking Generation X and politics.”

Lead . . . or Leave is on the mend, he insists. But no matter what happens from here, he wants to prove that Lead . . . or Leave wasn’t a waste of time. From his backpack, he pulls out a manila folder and slides it across the table. Inside is a stack of letters from young people, many of which share a theme: I didn’t see why I should get involved until Lead . . . or Leave came along.

“We reached people,” Nelson says, his eyes beaming. “That’s a fair standard of effectiveness. Another is to change policy, and I don’t know how to measure what we did in that regard. But we stirred things up.” He is, tellingly, using the past tense.

In 1992, Generation X politics did seem astir. The cable channel MTV aired hours of coverage on the presidential race, rendering voting cool. Candidate Bill Clinton, the first presidential nominee born after World War II, pursued the youth vote on the now-canceled “Arsenio Hall Show” with his wailing on the sax. Ross Perot applied his twang to sermons on how the national debt burdens younger generations. And twentysomethings responded. After a steady, two-decade decline in voting, they flocked to the polls in record numbers. More than 44% of Americans age 20 to 24 voted, an 18% increase over 1988 levels. Among those between 25 and 29, nearly half visited the voting booth, a 14% boost from the last presidential election. Sure, every population slice--the experts call them cohorts--turned out at higher levels, but no increase was as dramatic as the one for Gen Xers. The Clinton campaign credited the youth vote as a key factor in its triumph.

During the campaign and the year afterward, a small band of ambitious and mad-as-hell twentysomethings--mainly in Washington and New York--hatched organizations to press what they called the political demands of their peers. Lead . . . or Leave scored media hits against politicians whose irresponsibility about the deficit, it said, would be the ruin of its generation. Another group produced an angry manifesto. Generation X politics had arrived with a slam.

But the bang is gone. In last fall’s elections, the number of young people voting fell to its usual low level. Those between 18 and 29 totaled only 12% of the electorate--almost a 32% drop from the 1992 figure. Though midterm congressional elections always draw fewer voters than presidential contests, the drop-off, as this statistic shows, was far more pronounced for the X-crowd than for the rest of the nation. The percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds voting was a skimpy 20%--the same as in the 1990 congressional elections. (Baby boomers voted at about twice the rate of X-people.)

The 1994 election was a return to a trend that has existed since 18-year-olds received the right to vote in 1972, when the student movement of the 1960s was still barreling along. From that point on, in each election--1992 being the one exception--the participation of young adult voters has waned, and at a pace sharper than the decline recorded by the whole population. Recent polls indicate political disenchantment is soaring among Generation Xers. (See sidebar.)

No one clear reason explains the dramatic decrease in the youth vote. Curtis Gans, director of the public-interest group the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, notes that in 1992 the generational politics of the presidential race, the anxiety-producing recession, the prominence of issues relevant to Xers (such as abortion and education funding) and the attempts of the Democrats to attract twentysomethings led to the surge in young voters. Last year, none of these conditions were present; neither party made a specific bid for the Generation X crowd.

Some watchers of youth politics believe that in the cynical 1990s, young adults who are fed up with national politics but still feel a civic calling are more inclined to turn to service-oriented causes than electoral activity: They might join a literacy project rather than a political campaign. But a few twentysomethings have endeavored to mold their population chunk into a more conventional political force. Success has not yet greeted them, for no sweeping movement has materialized behind these endeavors to create generation-specific political muscle.

*

Lead . . . or Leave, the most prominent of these efforts, aimed to be at least one--if not the-- voice of Generation X and a true political player. The group grew out of near-tragedy. In 1991, Rob Nelson, a direct-mail fund-raiser for liberal advocacy groups, fell off a cliff in the Adirondacks while ice-climbing. The fall could have killed him, but he survived and took to heart the notion that he had been offered a second chance. He began searching for a challenge.

The following spring, he was rock-climbing with Cowan, a Santa Monica native who had worked for Democratic Rep. Mel Levine. The two began to talk about generational politics--or the lack thereof--and a series of discussions ensued on “why things are so screwed up for our generation,” Cowan recalls. Both were horrified by the national debt and the government’s lack of investment in the future. They wondered whether they could mobilize their fellow twentysomethings on this front.

Late one night, after several beers and then several coffees, they had an idea: Let’s demand that politicians resign if they fail to halve the deficit within four years. They jotted on a napkin the pledge they would request politicians sign, and devised a catchy name for their project: Lead . . . or Leave. They put off graduate school plans--Nelson was heading to Stanford Law School, Cowan to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government--and launched a campaign on behalf of their generation.

To Nelson and Cowan, the federal debt symbolized the bankrupt politics of Washington. They also considered the debt a unifying force among their peers. Whatever differences exist among members of this cohort, they all would have to pay for the government’s borrowing of today. Economists, naturally, disagree over the problems posed by the national debt and the need for severe deficit relief. But partisans on all sides concur that how the debt is reduced is an all-important part of any fiscal debate. Yet the Lead . . . or Leave pledge did not specify how the debt should be shrunk. Tax hikes? Military cuts? Social Security cuts? The message was: Just do it. This was politics without politics. No hard choices. A gimmick.

But it worked--to an extent. Nelson and Cowan, sassy and articulate, easily gained media notice as Gen Xers angry about one of the more esoteric, mind-numbing topics on the national scene. Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts and retiring Republican Sen. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, who were organizing their own anti-debt organization, endorsed the pair’s endeavor. Nelson and Cowan collected 100 signatures on the pledge from congressional candidates, and also managed to get Perot’s.

Most politicians blew them off. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) declined to see a Lead . . . or Leave group. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Nelson and Cowan say, agreed to sign and then took a pass. In October of 1992, they claim, one senator huffed at a Lead . . . or Leave delegation: “Students don’t vote. Do you expect me to come in here and just kiss your ass?”

About 20 who took the pledge--mainly Republicans and conservative Democrats--won their elections. More important than these unimpressive electoral results was that Nelson and Cowan, through their many appearances on MTV and other media, were lending a youthful face to anti-debt politics--territory previously dominated by rich old guys like Perot and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, who each contributed to Lead . . . or Leave.

Nelson and Cowan’s hyperbolic attacks on Social Security jibed nicely with the assaults waged by Peterson, now an investment banker, and others who want to privatize the retirement system. (Perot and Peterson declined to be interviewed for this article.) Here was a self-styled youth movement with corporate connections. In three years, Nelson and Cowan raised $1.3 million, according to Cowan, with two-thirds of it from foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals.

The pair developed Lead . . . or Leave into an organization with a loose membership. Anyone who wrote to it in support was considered a member, and the group’s database bulged with the names of tens of thousands. (Cowan says it peaked at 100,000. However, Andrew Weinstein, the group’s communications director last year, disagrees and estimates the figure to be 30,000 to 40,000, with a third of those truly interested in steady participation.) They held rallies at campuses. Student governments at scores of colleges decided to affiliate and work with Lead . . . or Leave. Nelson and Cowan claimed they represented more than 1 million young people.

They adopted a brash style. They dumped 4,000 pennies on the steps of the Capitol, each cent representing a billion dollars of the debt. They protested in front of the headquarters of the American Association of Retired Persons, the 33-million-member lobby for seniors. Propelled by gloom-and-doom forecasts that claim the Social Security system will go bust in 30 years--before Cohort X can collect--the demonstrators decried AARP’s opposition to limiting Social Security payments to well-off elderly.

After Nelson and Cowan organized a party and mailed prophylactics as invitations, an upset advisory board member resigned. The pair put off one potential donor when they arrived at a meeting in jeans and T-shirts. For a news magazine cover story, they posed with Nelson’s motorcycle in front of the Capitol. The national debt, they declared, is “our Vietnam.”

*

Skeptical critics in other youth groups dismissed the “Rob-and-Jon Show” as a media blitz rather than a true attempt at political organization. Student leaders questioned the grandiose claims Lead . . . or Leave released regarding its support on campuses. “If a million people were really behind Lead . . . or Leave, you would have known it,” remarks one Generation X organizer. “They’d be like the Christian Coalition.”

Another veteran of youth politics notes that the preoccupation with the debt only connected Lead . . . or Leave to a narrow band of Generation Xers: “They were much more attuned to the college crowd and kids of privilege, who have the luxury of worrying about their retirement. They did not speak to at-risk youths or hip-hoppers.”

Ultimately, the group never became a genuine grass-roots organization. Local chapters were not fully established, supporters were not integrated into any structure. “A lot of effort,” former communications director Weinstein says, “was put into promotion and not the nitty-gritty of organizing.”

Nelson and Cowan bristle when queried about these criticisms. “We often felt like we were drowning,” Cowan says. “We’d go on TV and get 1,500 phone calls. We didn’t have the resources to deal with them.” Both now maintain they intended to create not an organized mass movement but “an ongoing campaign for change,” as Nelson terms it.

The pair blame the complexity of the issues, as much as anything, for the fact that no movement swelled behind them. “Deficit, debt, the collapse of entitlements, underinvestment destroying your future--this is diffuse,” says Cowan. “We effectively went out and said, ‘The sky’s falling.’ But a lot of people went out and looked up and said, ‘You’re wrong.’ The sky falls very slowly.”

Nevertheless, they did rile up some members of their generation. They held two national conferences, distributed a high school curriculum on the national debt and participated in a voter registration program. Cowan says Lead . . . or Leave volunteers registered 175,000 people on campuses and at rock music shows. Cowan testified before a presidential commission on entitlement reform. They nearly appeared on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” (In one episode, Jason Priestly’s character organized a Lead . . . or Leave rally, but the scene was cut.)

Other youth organizers complain that Nelson and Cowan were too arrogant, too imaginative in claiming accomplishment and too concerned with getting on television. And Nelson and Cowan found themselves distracted. They had started Lead . . . or Leave by zeroing in on the debt and Social Security. A year later, they were spending time on voter registration campaigns, youth leadership conferences and other issues, including education funding. “They lost their clear, razor-edged focus,” Weinstein recalls.

In their book “Revolution X,” which came out last fall, Nelson and Cowan repeated their urgent call for deficit reduction and Social Security reform, now offering a sketchy budget plan. They also advocated gay rights, economic investment, gun control, universal college access, abortion rights, health-care reform, an end to homelessness and a 30% cut in military spending. The book was not a Lead . . . or Leave project. Still, some conservative-leaning student government presidents affiliated with the group complained about the liberal notions Nelson and Cowan were championing, according to Weinstein, and urged them to stay fixed on the deficit and voter registration.

On Election Day last November, Cowan proclaimed, “We’re about to unleash millions of voters on the political process.”

Not that day. Young people stayed home. And in the months after the election, Lead . . . or Leave’s funding dried up. What had once been a staff of a dozen or so withered. The group had to move to cheaper offices in Washington, D.C. For a few weeks, its phones did not work. Then Nelson and Cowan told friends they were quitting the day-to-day responsibilities. In Washington, the easy jokes came: The leaders of Lead . . . or Leave are, well, leaving. They had no troops to field as the budget battles of Washington moved toward Medicare and inched toward Social Security.

“We tried to be a lot of things to a lot of people,” Cowan remarks. “It was a mistake. We learned that we can’t do voter registration, deficit reduction and education reform.” With that lesson in mind and $125,000 in fresh funding pledges, Nelson and Cowan are poised to initiate a new Lead . . . or Leave drive that will bring them back to their roots: an assault on the Social Security system. They favor limiting benefits to those who earn more than $40,000 a year and allowing wage earners to opt out of Social Security to set up private pensions.

Nelson and Cowan plan to remain part of Lead . . . or Leave, but they intend to let others run it. Nelson is off to Stanford Law School. Cowan has been appointed deputy assistant secretary for long-range planning at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They are trying to organize a Generation X version of the Renaissance Weekends attended by the Clintons and other power families of the baby boom.

“We never believed we were in the middle of the biggest youth movement in 30 years,” Cowan says, taking the stance of a realist. “We never thought we would have 3 million students marching on Washington.” Though one suspects that there were moments when Nelson and Cowan did envision such an uprising.

*

Lead . . . or Leavers are not the only twentysomethings whose call to arms has gone unheeded by most Xers. In March of 1993, as a blizzard raged in Washington, about two dozen twentysomethings huddled at Hickory Hill, the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. The weather had scotched their plans to gather at Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., and Douglas Kennedy, a reporter for the New York Post and one of the conveners, had arranged for the use of his family’s house. The weekend’s mission was to start crafting a generational crie de coeur --a 1990s version of the 1962 Port Huron statement that accompanied the birth of Students for a Democratic Society, the leading youth movement of the 1960s.

After four months of intermittent discussion, the group held a press conference and issued the Third Millennium Declaration. The preamble reported that “economic stagnation, social fragmentation and the deterioration of the environment” had led its authors to “fear for the future.” Noting that they did not “pretend to represent our entire generation,” the declarers announced that they were coming together--regardless of political differences--to “chart a new direction for the country.” They wanted neither “a generational war” nor to be bogged down by “divisive issues such as abortion and the death penalty.” They called for getting tough on crime, with strict gun control and sentencing laws, revitalizing inner cities, bolstering the education system, reforming welfare, improving race relations and clamping down on pollution. But the No. 1 topic on their mind was the $4-trillion national debt.

Like Nelson and Cowan, these Xers had decided that if any political matter bonded their diverse generation, it was the debt. The manifesto accused the nation’s elders of practicing “fiscal child abuse.” The authors urged streamlining government, but they named no programs to be cut--except for Social Security, which they called “a generational scam.” “We’ve had enough,” huffed journalist Jonathan Karl, one of the founders. With the document’s release, an organization called Third Millennium was started. Nelson and Cowan were charter members. For $9, anyone could join. A membership form asked whether an applicant was familiar with Windows or Macintosh.

Based in a cramped, one-room New York office and getting by on $100,000 a year, Third Millennium has lured only 1,400 members in two years. It is a New York-centric collection of intellectuals, not organizers.

“There is an elitist, WASPy crowd leading the generational debate,” acknowledges Heather Lamm, a 24-year-old board member of Third Millennium.

Perhaps Third Millennium’s most consequential action was the creation of a perfect sound-bite. That may sound trivial, but this band is out to nudge the media debate, not to conduct mass protests. Last fall, Third Millennium released a poll of young people that found that only 28% of them believed Social Security would exist by the time they retire, but 46% said they believed in UFOs. When Third Millennium representatives appeared last year before a presidential bipartisan commission on entitlement and tax reform, they highlighted this factoid.

“Since then,” says Fred Goldberg, executive director of the commission, “that finding has been cited hundreds of times. It’s a phrase that informs the debate. That is a major contribution.” Deroy Murdock, a 31-year-old writer, communications consultant and Third Millennium board member, is proud of this achievement: “We got people to laugh at Social Security, and that’s a very subversive thing.”

Third Millennium has issued in-depth analyses of Social Security and other entitlement programs, calling for strict affluence-testing. Last year, through op-ed articles, it waged war against the “community rating” provision of the Clinton health-care reform package. Under such a scheme, young adults would pay as much as older adults for health insurance, even though they use much less medical care.

In March, Lamm appeared before a House subcommittee and urged means-testing for Medicare. Otherwise, she testified, in a few years, when the system is expected to run out of money, a dilemma will exist: raise workers’ payroll taxes or slash benefit checks for all elderly, regardless of income. Two months later, Third Millennium dispatched 17-year-old Melanie Strauss, a Virginia high school senior, to the White House Conference on Aging. Afterward, Strauss and Gretchen Dee, Lead . . . or Leave’s 19-year-old delegate, assailed the conference for blocking resolutions they had drafted on Medicare and Social Security reform.

Instead of discussing organizing tactics, Richard Thau, a 30-year-old former senior editor for Magazine Week who runs Third Millennium, is more comfortable talking about the dozen or so members who have testified before Congress, been booked on television, or authored an article. He admits that his group’s fixation on Social Security and entitlements is not widely shared by twentysomethings.

“The numbers,” he says, “are inconceivable to most people. People are just bored by it. These are not visceral issues.”

Noting that twentysomethings vote in small numbers, Goldberg of the presidential commission remarks: “I do not believe that any sitting politician has concluded that Generation X is a potent political force. If the question is, ‘Are Generation X, Lead . . . or Leave and Third Millennium having a major impact on the debate?’ the answer is ‘No.’ If the question is, ‘Are they a potential force?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely yes.’ ” Congressional aides who handle budget matters note that Lead . . . or Leave and Third Millennium are not influential actors in the deliberations of Washington.

*

But Generation X is not going to go away; it will just get older. “People in this age group will eventually settle down, buy homes, and then they’ll vote,” Murdock remarks, with hope in his voice. “Until then, you can try to get people to think.” In the meantime, Thau concedes, addressing an entire generation is not easy: “What is the grand unifying force [for Generation X]? It has not been demonstrated to me that Social Security is it.”

Most politically active Xers are not bothering to seek that unifying force. They are involved in the classics--say, environmental activism--and far outnumber those activists of the Lead . . . or Leave/Third Millennium bent.

In February, 1,800 student environmentalists assembled at the University of Pennsylvania to plot responses to the actions of the new Republican Congress. Young feminists, led by Rebecca Walker, daughter of novelist Alice Walker, have formed the Third Wave to press feminist-friendly social change. College Democrats, which experienced a 33% drop in membership after 1992, has seen that dip reversed in the months after the GOP took over Congress. (During the past year, the College Republicans have been racked by an internal dispute.)

The L.A.-based Rock the Vote, which claims to have registered 350,000 young voters in 1992, has already started another extensive registration campaign for 1996. (It is enlisting potential voters on several concert tours, including those of REM and Soul Asylum.) Some students are using the Internet to organize opposition to threatened Republican cutbacks in education funding. The Black Student Leadership Network is recruiting “servant-leaders” to perform community service in low-income communities and to lobby for social programs for children. There even is a small gang of conservative Generation Xers who distribute a newsletter via e-mail.

Among those who follow youth politics, a consensus has developed: Xers who are civic-minded serve instead of vote. Vanessa Kirsch, the 29-year-old founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Allies, which places young adults in community service positions, recalls that a few years ago, when she worked for a pollster, a survey of young people found most describing themselves as active citizens. But asked if they voted, they said no. So, the pollsters asked, how then are you an active citizen? I helped clean up my neighborhood, a typical response went. Service--tutoring kids, delivering meals to shut-ins, volunteering at a shelter for battered women, assisting AIDS patients--may be supplanting interest in electoral politics.

“Young people of any generation have reservoirs of idealism waiting to be tapped,” says Eric Liu, a 26-year-old Harvard law student who edits The Next Progressive, a magazine for twentysomethings. Liu, an ex-White House speech-writer and former congressional aide, was once among that small corps of eager, college-educated young adults who each year flock to Washington to work in government and politics--a group well-populated by the Xers. “But what goes on in Washington seems to be so absurd and staged. So young people opt out and channel idealism into other areas,” he says. “If there is something that unites this generation, it is the inclination to look for bypasses, to find a way around the clogged-up and the sclerotic.”

When Kirsch recently visited her alma mater, Tufts University, she was surprised to learn that a service organization was the largest student group on campus. “Young people feel more of an impact through these programs than through voting and traditional politics,” she says.

To illustrate this point, Kirsch rounds up a dozen young adults working in Public Allies. All are concerned with the world about them, but none give a damn about the debt, Social Security, or generational politics--and most see little point in conventional politics. James Couch, 22, notes that “our version of politics is what we do in our communities.”

Alison Dow, 26, remarks, “I see politics as really divisive, pitting one group against another. That led me to do community service, where you can bring people together. I consider that a very political act.” To them, electoral politics is an abstract activity with no guarantee of a pay-back; service is an authentic experience with discernible results. “Service is our political statement,” says 23-year-old Michael Watts.

Organizing young adults politically has been and always will be hard. They tend to move more often; they do not have much money; they are uncertain about employment. Retired coupon-clippers who draw Social Security and use Medicare have more time for national politics--and more of an immediate reason to care about what happens on these fronts in Washington. The Vietnam draft and the civil-rights crusade were great motivators for the young of the 1960s. Perhaps today’s twentysomethings will join a political fold once they settle into jobs, homes and families. But that would entail a serious awakening, given how cool they are to the political system.

Until then, the leaders of the Third Millennium and Lead . . . or Leave yearn for a white knight, a charismatic figure--someone Kennedyesque--who can animate the generation. “We need a politician who will personalize the issue for young people,” says Heather Lamm. “But I don’t know what crazy individual is willing to take the elderly on, when they vote and young people do not.”

The debt-crazy politicos of Gen X have no intention of flaming out. But they remain a vanguard without a wave behind them. They assume that the coming fiscal crunch--the potential collapses of Social Security and Medicare--eventually will enliven their comrades-in-age. But at the present time, defining their generation politically will be rough going.

“This generation,” says Nelson, “does not have a cohesive ideological framework. Unlike youth, age unites people very tightly. As a whole, young people don’t perceive themselves to be vulnerable. We could never form an AARP for young people. Not enough ties them together. But that does not mean we can’t effect change. The consensus now is that the entitlement system won’t last. It took a while to get there. We helped shift consciousness, and that will lead to a policy shift. It’s not enough, but it’s a step.”

For now, Cowan says, “we are a small band of folks who can occasionally create leverage and put pressure on institutions.” But in judging them, the two urge, don’t get hung up on conventional Washington results. Nelson and Cowan, who talk much about “raising consciousness,” claim as their truest success that some Gen Xers--who knows exactly how many?--could look at Lead . . . or Leave and see young people getting off their duffs and trying something political.

Nelson returns to his manila folder. He is particularly proud of one letter, and for reasons that have nothing to do with fiscal policy or generational equity. It is from a Marine looking to join Lead . . . or Leave. He had been moved by a portion of Nelson and Cowan’s book to reconsider his thoughts on gay rights. “I’m not an advocate of gays,” the Marine wrote. “But I’m learning to accept them.”

With a look of pride, Nelson says, “People felt empowered-- by us . How much impact does it have? Who knows? But doesn’t that count for something?”