Why we're here

We want to talk about policy and politics. For those of us who were reared in the cultural gray area that allowed us to miss the substance of Reagan while having our political cherry popped by eight years of a Clinton presidency, the election of 2008 has generated an unprecedented change in our young generation's posture toward politics. The candidate we voted for has never made it to the White House. Our parents invoke "Jack" and "Bobby," but decades span between those figures' deaths and our births. We have seen an array of underwhelming political figures who have caused us to wonder if a typology - that of the transformational figure - died along with those exemplars of the 60s. Sure, we have found inspirational figures elsewhere, but we've struggled to get the bad taste out of our mouth since convincing ourselves to care about John Kerry in 2004 after spending four years complaining about the great train robbery that was the election of 2000.

So, that's not to say we're going to spend most of our words shilling for Sen. Obama's candidacy, which seems to be the modus operandi of anyone who throws around the words "change" and "transformation" these days. Rather, we want to highlight in this introductory post the impact that a figure like Obama can have on a generation of sentient beings who have been denied the pleasure of being invigorated by a political figure. Our peers are more likely to cite Steve Jobs as a visionary than anyone for whom they've cast a ballot. They're more likely to seek a job in social enterprise than embrace a public sector that has for years been dominated by hackery (at best). Here we seek to capitalize on that energy and harness the momentum (there's that word again!) that the current political season has created not around a particular candidate, but around the political fervor of a generation.