Youths Denied Convention Access

A group of young superachievers and aspiring lawmakers gathered at Occidental College this week to build their own political platform and share ideas with delegates, but instead they found themselves literally locked out of the process.

About 200 students spent the week at the Los Angeles Youth Convention on the Eagle Rock campus, gearing up for a climactic afternoon visit to the Democratic National Convention to share ideas with delegates and lawmakers.

Ultimately, only 10 passes were shared among the students, who waited more than two hours in scorching heat outside Staples Center, watching well-heeled guests arrive in limos and file past them. Most gave up and returned to the college campus, organizers said. About 80 students got in, but were allowed to stay only 15 minutes each.

When a troop of Boy Scouts filed past the student group to pose for a picture with a delegate, David Sobotkin, 19, of Long Island, N.Y., said he felt young people were useful to the process only as props.

“We refuse to be photo ops,” he said. “We’re here to offer solutions.”

Staff members with the Democratic convention host committee said organizers and students had held exaggerated hopes of gaining access to the convention floor.

“We don’t even tell people who give upward of $1 million that we’ll get them credentials because we just don’t control that,” host committee spokesman Ben Austin said.

Eric Garcetti, an event organizer and Occidental College politics instructor, acknowledged, “Our expectations were even higher” than those of the students.

The youth convention staff said the botched DNC visit did little to ease building cynicism among some young people who felt ignored by the nation’s lawmakers.

“There’s a reason they’re not voting,” said Peter Raducha, executive director of the Youth in Action Los Angeles office. “They’re not voting because candidates aren’t reaching out to them.”

During the four-day convention, students lived on campus and worked on the Youth in Action platform, a document addressing issues of poverty, education, crime, health care and human rights.

The youth activism group, which is funded by several nonprofit groups and charitable organizations, polled thousands of people 14 to 24 years old nationwide to develop the outline for the platform.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles participants outlined their solutions to long-standing problems for John Hagelin, the Natural Law Party founder who is vying for the Reform Party nomination. He sat onstage next to an empty chair with a sign that read, “Reserved for Al Gore.”

In their platform, students said they want more teacher accountability, more money spent on schools and less spent building prisons. Their platform, which favors abortion rights and opposes the death penalty, will be published this month and distributed to schools across the country and to select politicians, organizers said.

Mayor Richard Riordan also dropped by the convention Wednesday after introducing Vice President Al Gore to a group at Burbank Airport. He said he was impressed with the challenging nature of students’ questions.

“I could probably learn more from you than you could learn from me,” he said.

The Los Angeles youth convention was the fourth organized by Youth in Action, a national nonpartisan group that promotes youth activism. It sponsored events to coincide with the major party conventions in 1996 and this year.

Most of the high school and college students are from the Los Angeles area and were nominated by teachers and community leaders to attend the program. They posed challenging questions to legislators and other elected officials who came to exchange ideas with the group.

Although their idealism took a beating, some student delegates got a chance to bask in the event’s glamour, dashing off Wednesday afternoon to Patriotic Hall for a panel discussion with former teen idol Donnie Osmond and singer Lisa Loeb broadcast live on CNN.com.

“Lisa Loeb, man!” said Sobotkin, who wore a suit and tie for the occasion. “How cool is that?”

Other students said the youth convention inspired them to get better organized to get their message across to lawmakers. They exchanged phone numbers and business cards and talked excitedly about the protests that have crowded downtown this week.

David Lyons, 16, who hosts his own radio talk show in Sacramento, wore a three-piece suit and followed Riordan’s staff around Occidental’s Thorne Hall, trying to schedule a meeting with the mayor.

“I’ve made up 1,000 business cards, and I’ve gone through them in two days,” Lyons said.

Sobotkin is a Long Island native attending college in Allentown, Pa., with plans to practice civil rights law. He called himself a Republican who favors abortion rights and who has “every intention of running for Congress.”

“You have to kill the lion from the inside.”