Anthony Daniels, a gifted speaker who I've written about before here, started the Millennials Rising: Young Voters Revitalizing Democracy panel by saying, "As we've seen, voting is cool again. ... The youth can put you in office and they can take you out again."

Anton Gunn, former political director for Barack Obama in South Carolina, talked about how young people today see the real economic crises that affect them firsthand. HIs experience as an organizer taught him, "Winning is about winning, it's not about getting close." That's the theme here today. It seems that progressives are more or less tired of losing, and they're starting to organize in a real way -- or at least, that's the hope.

Diana Nguyen, from Declare Yourself, talks about how they try to harness technologies like Facebook and MySpace that young people dominate to register and mobilize young people.

Rock the Vote's Heather Smith talked about how they've been helping to build a movement for many years, and it is just now starting to show. She talked of three things that the youth coalition (of which Campus Progress is a part) is doing: 1) they're basing their mobilizing on polling and best practices -- going after the youth in the ways that will best speak to them, since this is the most diverse generation we've seen in a long time, 2) implementing these best practices on a national level and building a single voter file, and 3) crafting the narrative in a way that will grab the public and the media, by flipping the apathetic generation narrative on its head.

Carmen Berkley, from USSA, talked about how she's 22 years old and a leader in her organization. She noted that it's key to get young people in leadership positions. She talked about her own narrative, as a real middle class person whose mother works in a union and her father isn't really in the picture.

One thing I've noticed is that the personal narratives that young people can put forth. Unfortunately, some members of the older generation are more comfortable with stereotypes of young people ignoring the world while plugging an iPod into our ears rather than paying attention to the reality of large debt loads and working multiple jobs just to get through school.