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Watch Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi answer questions submitted by YouTube users. She talks about Congress coming on the YouTube, the 2008 election and th...

YouTube gathers video content from the debates, the super-recent sound bites, best of the week videos, the candidates voices on particular issues--economy, healthcare, education, energy, immigration--election news from YouTube's partner sites, and videos organized by upcoming primaries. This is a wonderful resource for promoting media literacy, rhetorical analysis, as well as political awareness. It may also be a lobbying tool for expanded video access.

The number of voters under 30 in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections remained stagnant at just 17 percent. Teens become apathetic because politicians are unresponsive, politicians become indifferent to teens because they are apathetic and don't vote.
The way to break this cycle is to make teens feel like they have a voice that politicians will listen to. Politicians have been reaching out to youth by holding events on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. CNN even held the YouTube debates, allowing users to submit questions directly to candidates. Making politicians answerable to young people forces their interests to be considered.\n\n

Over view of how the web site called US Election 2008 Web Monitor works

election videos from PBS Kids

This is a tremendous resource!

Judging by Obama's savvy use of social-networking sites during his campaign and the interactive nature of his transition team's Web site, Americans can expect a president who bypasses the traditional media's filters while reaching out to citizens for input, observers say. "The rebooting of our democracy has begun," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and the techPresident blog. "[Obama] has the potential to transform the relationship between the American public and their democracy."