I ran across this scanning the Tennessee blogs today (courtesies go here)

A Knoxville native is the Tennessee citizen journalist on MTV’s Street Team ‘08, which was announced last week.

The Street Team is made up of 51 citizen reporters who will follow the 2008 election with weekly multimedia reports optimized for mobile devices. See a story with the full list.

The reports will be distributed on MTV’s mobile site, its social site think.mtv.com and the Associated Press’ Online Video Network, which includes knoxnews.com.

The Tennessee reporter is Nashville-based Dustin Ogdin, a documentary filmmaker, whose latest project is “Shielded Brutality.” He also did a short this year on the “living wage” controversy at Vanderbilt University.

This sounds, well…useless.

The technology idea is great. I’m all for more of it, especially in covering politics. Unfortunately it’s an MTV product, which means that no one who watches it will be awake in time to vote. I assume there is a hope that the inclusion with the AP sites might offer some sort of journalistic redemption.

One doesn’t have to be an old codger to realize the relative unimportance of the youth vote. The eighteen to twenty-nine demographic, which, mind you, I am barely detached from, is good for many economically important things (such as our nation’s future), but voting in the present is not one of them. In fact, they are pretty darn awful at it.

Remember the “Vote or Die” ad campaign from 2004? I think Paris Hilton was involved, who didn’t vote. Its sponsor, P. Diddy, wasn’t registered either. Serving the logic of the campaign, apparently, tragically, a lot of young people died.

Hunter Thompson said it well

“Yeah, we rocked the vote all right,” quips Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist himself. “Those little bastards betrayed us again.”

So beware you candidates who rely on the unreliable. Howard Dean learned the lesson, and only lived to scream about it. My sixth sense points me this year to another victim. If Hillary holds it together (a big “if”), the Barack Obama candidacy still remains in great peril. Betting the political farm on the support of my generation is akin to navigating Cape Horn in the SS Minnow. If I were Obama, I’d stay away from the red long sleeves.

UPDATE On topic, the AP’s quote-of-the-day (the day being Christmas Eve, 2007)

“Many candidates over the years have said they’ll bring in more young people and more women to the caucuses. Virtually all of those efforts have been failures. No matter how much hoopla surrounds the caucuses, the people who show up tend to be the party regulars.” – Hugh Winebrenner, an emeritus professor and caucus historian at Iowa’s Drake University.