Luke Russert
This election season, the Capitol Hill reporter
turns a new generation on to politics
Washington-based NBC News corre- spondent Luke Rus- sert, 27, got his first
lessons in journalism and politics at an
early age. The only child of Vanity Fair
special correspondent Maureen Orth
and the late Meet the Press moderator
Tim Russert, he grew up in a family
where journalism was, as he puts it,
“the family profession,” with steady
doses of fairly sophisticated conversation around the dinner table.
In addition to standard talk about
school and sports, “I distinctly
remember being 9 years old and
talking about the Republican revolu-
tion and Newt Gingrich and what
that meant,” recalls Russert. He has
other memories of dinner-table
colloquies centered on such topics
as Monica Lewinsky and the 2000
presidential election.
“My opinion was not only val-
ued,” he says, “but [my parents] also
demanded that I speak to it in the
sense that, if I wasn’t able to speak to
it, I couldn’t really participate.”
After being raised in such a politi-
cally fertile environment—and inside
the Beltway, to boot—Russert’s
encounters with fellow students at
college “who didn’t really know
anything about politics at all”
came as “a huge adjustment.” Not
long after his college graduation,
however, Russert found himself
covering American youths who
were newly energized by a presi-
dential campaign that featured
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
and John McCain (who, Rus-
sert is quick to remind, had
developed a strong youth
following when he ran for
president in 2000).
Now covering the
House of Representatives along with
the youth beat for a
host of NBC News programs, Russert
thinks we probably won’t see young
people turn out in 2012 with the same
kind of force they did in the historic
2008 election. But he believes that the
best way to foster long-term engagement in politics among younger voters is to make them understand “the
severity of the issues” facing them.
When Russert looks at the demographic makeup of Congress, it’s a
need that seems especially stark.
“So many of these battles here
on Capitol Hill are fought amongst
old white men,” he observes. “The
Senate,” for example, “is so old—you
have people who have been there
since the 1970s, and they’re fighting
over things that don’t necessarily
really directly impact them.”
Citing the national debt and
our nation’s wars as t wo glaring
examples, Russert notes, “My gen-
eration will have to deal with the
consequences ... and that point is
not taken, I think, seriously enough
amongst young people.”
With Luke Russert, though, there’s
at least one young person on Capitol
Hill who does take it seriously.
—Eric Wybenga
With his late
father, noted
journalist Tim
Russert, in
2004.
