From the Road Trip-- Day One

1:45 pm CDT - It’s a sunny, stunningly beautiful, ungodly hot day at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Our glorious brand-new Rock The Vote bus is parked two hundred yards from a stage where the local band ‘Biscuits and Gravy’ are doing their sound check.

The bus

On October 7th, less than a month from now, Belmont will host the second of three presidential debates. You may remember it from past years. Debate number two is the one where heavily vetted everyday Americans will get to ask whatever pressing questions a panel of debate moderators deem suitable for a national audience. There will be no freaks, weirdos, or conspiracy theorists among the questioners here, which is probably just as well, though it will make things less exciting.

And less exciting is not what we want. Those of us among the Rock-The-Vote generation - we eighteen-to-twenty-somethings who are voting for our first or second time - like excitement. We are the YouTube, interactive video-gaming, eyes-thoughts-and-selves-plugged-into-the-internet generation. We are Wikipedia editors, political bloggers, environmentalists, fundamentalists, minimum-wage workers without health care, and i-bankers with second homes. Honestly we are a diverse bunch. And, electorally speaking, we are a sleeping giant. This election Rock The Vote has registered 1.5 million of us. That’s roughly ten times Kerry’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania in ‘04; twelve-and-a-half times Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio; and 150 times Bush’s margin of victory in Iowa. If us youngsters come out to the polls on November 4th, the candidates - both of them - will have to start listening. And excitement brings us out.

So we are having a bus tour. Because a bus tour is exciting. And we are using that excitement to build on the underlying excitement of this election. We youngins are starting a movement. Call cultural, call it political, call it what you want, but 49% of 18 to 29 year olds came out to vote in '04, which was up nine points from four years earlier. And we aim to continue that trend. And one facet of that is our bus tour. And you can find out where we are bus-touring here. And I am done grandstanding for the moment.

4:36 pm CDT - The first vote-rocking of the tour has occurred. The rockers in question: Biscuits and Gravy, Natalie Henderson, Gordon Kennedy, and - our headliner - Melinda Doolittle.

The entire ensemble attended Belmont in their college years and Gordon won a grammy for ‘Change the World’ in 1996. A picture is worth a bunch of words though, so I’ll let the ones below speak for the afternoon.

Biscuits and Gravy serve up delicious southern-style... music


Natalie Henderson visits the bus


Gordon Kennedy plays for the building crowd


Melinda Doolittle vote-rocking


Melinda again.

-- From Rock the Vote activist Nick Brown