Rock the Vote Rocked by Failure

Rock the Vote Is Stuck in a Hard Place

It's not surprising that the L.A. Times would completely miss the real story of Rock the Vote's failure: it lied to its target audience by taking sides, and it picked the wrong one to boot.

When Rock the Vote started, it was supposed to be a non-partisan effort to register young people to vote. Certainly a noble goal worthy of support from both sides of the political aisle.

What Rock the Vote quickly became is an advocacy group that focuses its efforts on promoting liberal causes. So the donations from the deep pockets on the other side of the political aisle dried up: what kind of fool would pay to support the opposition? That only left liberal donors to keep the group afloat, and those donors were already giving money to every other leftist advocacy group and political campaign under the sun. There simply wasn't enough money to go around because no one had built making up Rock the Vote's donor deficit into their budget.

Was there mismanagement? No doubt there was, but that isn't the real reason that Rock the Vote is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. They're in debt because they thought they could spend a fortune bringing out young liberals to defeat Bush in the 2004 election. The thinking was that they would make it all back when grateful donors credited them for John Kerry's electoral success because they would claim that they were responsible for turning out the youth vote. Unfortunately for them, John Kerry lost in a big way and the anticipated donations to make up the shortfall never arrived.

The old saying goes that you reap what you sow, and what Rock the Vote has sown is turning out to be nothing more than rocky soil...