ABSTRACT
The election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America on 4 November 2008 signaled a paradigm shift in American politics and potentially in the way youth and young adults are formally educated into their roles as ‘citizens’. First, the Obama campaign was planned and carried out in a ‘grass roots’ manner grounded in the belief that the only way to energise and recapture the electorate into political life in the country was to convince regular voters that they did have the power to make change and to hold their elected offi cials accountable for what they promised to do once in offi ce. Young voters were targeted specifi cally in this strategy.
