Wising Up the Youngsters

Back in our younger days the old folks used to fret over the lack of trust we had for our national institutions. Now that we’ve reach old fogeyhood, we find ourselves slightly heartened to see that the current crop of young folks are at long last becoming mistrustful of government.

Although we have not noticed this trend in our own occasional encounters with the under-30 set, we are assured it is underway by a recent poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. The ivy-covered organization’s annual survey of “millennials,” as today’s 18- to 29-year-olds are often called, found that their trust of government has dropped below even last year’s “historically low levels.” Almost every institution has seen its numbers slip, with Wall Street and the United Nations being the unaccountable exceptions, and it’s gotten to the point that even President Barack Obama is trusted by only 32 percent of the respondents.

Given the youngsters’ overwhelming support for Obama in the past two elections, the polling results are potentially good news for Republicans. Other hopeful numbers in the poll are that 44 percent of those who voted for Romney say they will definitely vote in the mid-term elections, compared to only 35 percent of Obama who say the same thing, and those identifying themselves as Republicans have increased in number even if they remain a minority. More importantly, the broader finding that “millennials” are less trusting of the government suggests they might at long last be persuaded to stop voting for more and more of it.

The wising-up of the young folks is not surprising, as they were bound to notice sooner or later that the candidates they have embraced are eager to stick them with the old folks’ medical bills along with a $17 trillion national debt and a massive regulatory state and meager employment prospects, but it remains to be seen if the GOP can win their votes. Our experience of young folks suggests that the lure of hope and change and free stuff has a powerful effect on them, and the next Democratic candidate could still convince them that despite whatever disappointments they’ve experienced in the past the next time is going to be different. Republicans still suffer from a reputation as sexually repressed squares, too, and the only things young people seem to desire more than hope and change and free stuff are sexual license and being thought hip. Undoing the the damage done by the public schools and higher education and all those touchy-feely soccer leagues might require an ever greater catastrophe than the one they’ve been living all their adult lives.

The best the Republicans can likely hope for is that fewer young people will bother to vote all, but even that might be enough to swing a few elections their way. If the Democrats are obliged to make their promises at least somewhat more plausible, and have to campaign without the youthful idealism and energy of the whippersnappers, that would also represent a significant improvement in America’s politics. Youthful idealism and energy are the most destructive forces known to history, and the sooner they are blunted by the hard-earned cynicism and lethargy of old age the better.

— Bud Norman

Former president Bill Clinton, who currently serves in the unofficial capacity of the current president’s “secretary in charge of explaining stuff,” has lately taken on the difficult chore of explaining Obamacare. In recent speeches and interviews he seemed to be trying to explain how the health care reform law will work so wonderfully that everyone will eventually learn to love it, an impossibly difficult chore even for a charlatan of Clinton’s talents, but he wound up explaining why it won’t work at all.

You’d be hard-pressed to find the fatal flaw in the networks’ coverage of Clinton’s much-ballyhooed joint appearance with President Barack Obama, which was devoted mostly to a star-struck awe at the assembled celebrity and much chuckling at Hillary’s joshing introduction and the obligatory recitations of Obama’s “secretary in charge of explaining stuff” honorific. All the top reporters described Clinton’s defense of Obamacare as “detailed,” but they provided few of those details. Although there was some vague acknowledgement that Clinton described a few piddly problems with the law to prove his objectivity and principled partisanship, only the conservative press was gauche enough to mention that Clinton conceded “This only works, for example, if young people show up.”

Anyone with first-hand experience of today’s young people will immediately be alarmed that the success of such an ambitious and expensive program as Obamacare is contingent upon them showing up. Just try getting a timely cup of coffee from the tattooed twenty-something at your local bohemian haunt and you’ll note that their attendance record is spotty at best. When they do show up they’re usually distracted from the matters at hand by some illegibly abbreviated text message, or the monotonous pop music of the moment piped by earphones into their shaggy heads, and even at their most attentive they don’t seem the sorts of people you would want to base the success of a major federal initiative upon.

Worse yet, Clinton expects young people to not only show up but also to shell out significant sums of money for something they don’t want and likely won’t need. “We’ve got to have them in the pools,” Clinton said, “because otherwise all these projected low costs cannot be held if older people with preexisting conditions are disproportionately represented in any given state.” A more frank, and therefore less Clintonian, way of putting it is that Obamacare depends on healthy young people paying premiums for insurance they won’t use in order to pay for a hip replacement on some geezer they’ve never met and probably wouldn’t like. Young people can be quite sincere about social justice when it means that wealth is redistributed to them, but Clinton is seriously overestimating youthful idealism if he expects the youth of today to go along with this plan.

There’s a much-hated “individual mandate” in Obamacare that compels buying insurance, which will be even more hated when the young people are forced to look at the bill in between texts, but for the next several years the fines will be cheaper than the insurance and thus seem a better deal to a typical teenager or twenty-something. The average healthy young person might be persuaded that a low-cost policy insuring against automobile wrecks or out-of-the-blue diseases is worth buying, but such arrangements are now illegal. Lacking any legal or economic rationale for buying any of the restricted number of plans available under Obamacare, the only reason young people have for buying in is to show support for the president who is sticking them with a sizeable health care bill.

Any sore feelings among Obama’s young supporters will supposedly be soothed by the all the subsidies that are going to be offered, but those costs will fall on the taxpayers or the national debt that young folks will be expected to eventually pay and it won’t make Obamacare economically viable. The costs that Obamacare imposes on employers also make it less likely that young people will ever get a job that pays well enough or for enough hours to pay the health care costs, making it more likely that they’ll take the subsidies and send the costs to already overburdened or taxpayers or pay it off themselves later when the debt at last comes due. Many young people will simply stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26 years old, another big selling point of the Obamacare law, but only in the increasingly unlikely event their parents get to keep their jobs or their employers continue to provide insurance.

There’s still a faint hope that those crazed fringe Republicans can withhold the money for Obamacare, but there’s no chance at all the law will work as promised. Even Bill Clinton tells us so.

— Bud Norman

Air Guitar Politics

Of all the strange things we kept hearing about Barack Obama back in 2008, by far the most perplexing was the frequent description of him as a “rock star.” The term connotes to us an egomaniacal, sexually perverted, drug-abusing, oddly-dressed flash-in-the-pan, which are hardly the qualities one desires in a president, but the people saying it always seemed to mean it as a compliment.

Presumably they meant Obama had some ineffable appeal to young people that enabled him to fill stadiums with worshipful admirers, which is yet another quality that we don’t necessarily desire in a president, but in any case they always seemed to believe that Obama is possessed of that special something that the kids call “cool.” The kids have been calling it that for at least the past 60 years, so perhaps the quotation marks are no longer necessary, but it should be made clear that they mean “cool” not as a synonym for calm and dispassionate but rather in the beatnik sense of being one hip daddy-o. We always found Obama rather snooty and sanctimonious and boring, but coolness is subjectively measured, and there’s no denying that an overwhelming majority of America’s 18-to-24-year-olds thought that voting for Obama in 2008 was the cool thing to do.

There seems to be some concern on the part of the Obama re-election campaign, however, that the youngsters won’t be voting for him by the same decisive margin this year. For some time now Obama has been giving his speeches almost exclusively at college campuses, and lately he’s even been taking his act to the late night talk shows that cater to the young insomniacs.

The reasons for concern are obvious. The continuing high rate of unemployment has disproportionately affected younger people, and the more attentive youths will find numerous other complaints with the Obama agenda. Surely at least some of Obama’s past voters will realize that the $5 trillion he added to the national debt during his first term will weigh most heavily on the younger generations, for instance, and they might even take a look at how various other Obama policies have disproportionately affected the young.

The effectiveness of Obama’s tactics to revive his past popularity with young America is less obvious. Half of the students at the colleges where Obama is giving speeches to will soon be either unemployed or working in a low-wage job requiring only a high school diploma, which explains why he’s playing smaller halls than he did during the last tour, and doing the rounds on the talk shows is better suited to pitching a new movie than another presidential term.

Most critics of Obama’s late night comedy act have argued that it is unpresidential, which is true, but the more pressing problem for him is that’s so very un-rock star. Back in the rock star heyday of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s no self-respecting would ever deign to sit and schmooze with some suit-and-tie-clad talk show host. In the era of three networks the talk shows were seeking a broader audience and wouldn’t have booked a rock band, anyway, but that was all the more reason for a rock star to avoid such squares. We’re told that the current crop of late night talk shows are hipper fare than what Johnny, Joey, and Dick used to offer, but over-exposure on even the hippest of them is bound to reduce the most celestial rock stars to mere celebrity status.

There are many star-struck young people out there who will be persuaded to vote for Obama because they regard his late night talk show schmoozing as cool, and we’ve endured futile conversations with more than a few, but it’s hard to imagine there will be nearly so many as the last time around. We have to believe, lest we forfeit all hope in the future, that at least some of the young people in America will now realize that there are more important requirements for the job of president than being cool. After being promised more hope and change than the president has been able to deliver, we hope that a crucial segment of the youth vote will recall the lyrics of The Who from back when rock stars were rock stars and vow that “We won’t be fooled again.”

— Bud Norman