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On Nov. 8, voters between the ages of 18 and 22 are expected to cast a majority of their votes for Vice President George Bush, but you’d never have known that from the CMJ Music Marathon, a gathering of students involved with college radio that was held last week at the Vista Hotel in New York City’s financial district.

From its opening on Thursday morning, Oct. 27, the convention’s overriding concern was how to express a more liberal viewpoint over the airwaves of college radio stations throughout the country.

To an extent, this was to be expected. It’s common to suppose that the young will be more liberal than the old, and there is a longstanding bias toward liberalism in the popular arts. Further, the proximity of the coming election would be expected to politicize even a music convention. But given the polls, one would nevertheless have expected a wider debate than that evident at the convention last week.

In one panel discussion after another, at open forums, in musical performances, and in the convention’s keynote address, the issue was not so much whether to push a liberal political agenda through college radio, it was how to do so.