Millennials Heading Rightward

The shift is probably partly, if not largely, due to the difference between the euphoria of victory and the long slog of your fave not just campaigning and celebrating the first few months in office, but actually having to try to govern the country. Republicans in the campaign and the election were losers, and the young like winning. Republicans since then have been obstructionists (there should be no argument about that, only whether it’s principle or petulance), and the young don’t like de facto deadlocks.Still, there probably wasn’t the same shift in the youth vote after the 2000 election. Eight months after GWB was sworn in, we had September 11th (which didn’t happen, of course, not on his watch), and all political bets were off for a while, as we went to war with a country that had nothing to do with September 11th and had only hallucinatory WMD’s.(Here come the Tea Partiers…)

To be more specific, in July 09, 51% of Millennials approved of Obama policy in Afghanistan. By Jan 10, that figure hit 34%. On the economy, Obama dove from 66% approval to 44% approval.

interestingly enough, i bet if you asked these millenials and Xers to articulate the policies of either party, they would be unable to do so with any degree of accuracy. politics in this country has essentially become a popularity contest, and elections have become nothing more than fraternity rush. politics in the US has very little to do with having a deep understanding of the serious issues that afflict us all, nor do people look at the bigger picture or the ramifications of taking a short term approach to problem solving. sooner or later we will all pay if we do not become a more empathic country. if you think what we’re living through is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. it is bound to get worse, and that my friends, was not created my the current administration. google TARP to refresh your memories on who enacted that.how quickly we forget that enormous surplus we had in the late 90′s.

Mark, I think you’re taking leaps of faith here. Just because so-called Millenials are down on Obama doesn’t mean they’re moving right. If anything, they’re down on Obama because he hasn’t been far enough left. They’re ticked that his doubled-down on Afghanistan, they’re ticked that public options in health care is off the table (although it may be getting back on the table if the Dems decide to not worry about the 60 votes), and they’re ticked that the banks got all that bailout money with no accountability. To quote from the report, “While the Republican Party picked up support from Millennials during 2009, this age group continues to favor the Democratic Party more than do other generations.” If anything, the Democratic/Republican split is settling down to more historic norms (acknowledging that the 2008 election was an anamoly, historically speaking).

Wow Mark, since when does the “structure of government” dictate that the President has power over the speaker of the house? And you have the audacity to call her “non-stop-partisan-cliche-spouting” while the GOP sits there and spends the entire year saying “No”? If she’s spouting cliches, then what do you call it when the GOP accuses the Dems of “death panels” killing grandma, and a overall “goverment takeover” of health care. Obama’s spent the better part of the last year trying to empower Congress to talk to each other. The holy grail of bipartisanship. Which for Democrats means collaboration and compromise, but for the GOP means, only if you agree with everything I say. Or, they way it’s played out in the last year: No. No plan. No discussion. But lots of “non-stop-partisan-cliche-spouting.” Obama’s “executive leadership” extends to his cabinet and staff, not the leadership of the House and Senate. Sure, he can be persuasive, and provide leadership on an issue, but he has no “executive” jurisdiction over there. I don’t know, something about the branches of government?

I’m not looking to ignore Obama and his missteps. There have been more than a few. And I’m well aware of many of them. And we can monday-morning-quarterback him all day. That said, he’s got a tough job when the GOP wants to spend all their time saying No, and they have absolutely no desire to have any discussion or actual debate. They would rather spend their time with non-stop-partisan-cliche-spouting. Obama incompetent? In terms of bills passed, last I checked he’s quite possibily the most successful president in recent history. Yeah, he’s tripped a few times on health care – in my view he gave the congress-critters way too much leeway in designing their own legislation. He should have just laid out his proposals (in detail) and worked from there. Live and learn. Now it looks like the Dems are going to push through reconciliation (which probably would not be happening unless Obama gave the green light). Obama has always been driven by fairness, and giving others voices even if they are in the minority. He and Pelosi could have pushed through the public option last summer, but they chose not to in deference to their GOP bretheren. I wouldn’t exactly call that incompetence.If anyone is incompetent here, it’s the GOP leadership who have refused to do anything but say no. As Obama said in his state of the union, “that’s not leadership.” And, like it or not, he’s right.If I’m reading your last post (#10) correctly (Latin notwithstanding) you seem to be making the case that it’s Obama’s fault that we don’t have HCR. I think it gets a little dicey if you look at the White House from 2001-2008 and then call Obama incompetent because he doesn’t do the things that Bush and the GOP majority railed through over eight years (including using budget reconciliation as a tactic to overcome filibusters). Obama is actually trying to play fair (in deference to the idea that he’s not just president of the Democracts, but he’s president of the Republicans as well), and you want to call that incompentent? He may not get it right all the time, but that’s what he’s trying to do.

Did anyone else see the Q&A President Obama did with the Republicans in Baltimore on 29 January? What a bunch of pathetic “questions” aka talking points, as he (more politely than I would have) discussed. As he also said, it’s not just the GOP; there’s plenty of fault to be found.Until our alleged representatives of both parties in both houses start behaving like adults, I see no reason why the young, the old, or the in-between should even consider voting for them again. I see no reason not to let them know what we think of their pathetic posturing. Frankly, when a stuffed shirt like Mike Pence (Rep. IN) takes five minutes to recite a list of ostensible sins the administration has supposedly committed that he feels are reprehensible, and then Obama points out to him gently that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it is simply embarrassing.These neocons or whatever they’re calling themselves this week do not represent conservatism, do not represent fiscal responsibility, and do not represent me, regardless of whose district I live in. I’m not young by a long ways, but robots reciting lines they can barely read from their notes, much less understand, will never get my vote. Obama has, like any first-term president, made his share of mistakes. But none of these compare to the mindless nullification of these thumb-sucking stooges. And if that seems ad hominem or just bad manners, watch the session. If I were the head of the Republican National Committee and had just watched that spectacle, I’d be thinking about opening a vein.

I’m a millennial and I’m pretty sure I know a hell of a lot more about American politics than, for example, my parents, or as another example, pretty much half of Congress. Is it then not true that my personal experience cannot be extrapolated to represent a broader conclusion? But in all seriousness, yes, my generation is pretty dumb. But so are a lot of generations. And so are most people throughout the generations, including most of the small percentage of the American public that even bothers to cast a vote for anything in the first place. These polls may tell us something about how people are behaving, but not much about why, or whether their behavior is warranted. I wouldn’t venture comparisons between the alleged in/competence of a portion of the electorate and the alleged success or failure of the heroes/stooges they’re voting for (for those who have ventured comparisons).I’ve also heard that according to that CQ index, Obama has actually been quite successful getting legislation passed relative to what he proposed to do in his campaign. Whether the passed legislation (to which we will add health reform after many have tried and failed before) will ‘work’ or not is a separate question (and one for the long-term in many cases).A question worth exploring (if it hasn’t already been explored) re. millenials: for all of our schizophrenia and knowledge deficits, are we at least handling the waves upon waves of new-media bullshit–and filtering accordingly–better than other generations as a result of our savviness with remediated ‘texts’? In other words, are we on some levels less likely to buy into kill-your-grandma ads and ‘viral’ e-mail campaigns full of misinformation? Or are we just more distracted by the jazzy music and sound effects and props and blondeness on cable news, suckers like everyone else?

It certainly seems like admiration for Obama among members of my generation (Millennials, or whatever you want to call us) is decreasing (a Valentine’s Facebook e-card stating something like, “I hope your love for me doesn’t fade as quickly as your love for Obama,” is an amusing sign of this), but I don’t know that my generation is really becoming more conservative or really cares all that much about real issues. I agree with others’ comments suggesting that politics are all about popularity and what’s “cool” for the Millennials. I was so disappointed in high school when my friends told me they would not support the gubernatorial candidate I favored because, when they were in elementary school, they had all taken a field trip on which they got to have their pictures taken with the other candidate in front of a race car. I know that was high school, and we’d hope that my peers would have grown up a little and learned something in the six years since then, but I don’t see much evidence of that.

Yes, Craig, I should have titled this “Millennials Rejecting Obama” instead of “Heading Rightward.”

Thanks to marktropolis for finding the CQ index I was alluding to upthread, but neglected to post.Prof. Bauerlein, I’m often divided re. this relationship between millenials and new media. On one hand it seems to me that we’re more adept at using new media and technology for fact-checking and secondary and tertiary consultations. On the other, it’s perhaps this tendency that undermines our ‘vertical’ understanding of issues and conflicts, leaving us grasping at ‘facts’ that we don’t properly understand in context. Further, I worry that the ‘democratizing’ of information frequently leaves us inept when it comes to deciding which sources are legitimate, or which ‘facts’ are facts. And even further, I worry that we’re already becoming desperately co-opted into systems of information production and delivery that create a market demand among us for sheer bullshit and, simultaneously, a desire among us to be bullshit producers (Web 2.0). From this we have all the data in the world, free of charge, to produce Web 3.0, semantic Web systems that already know what we want to read and buy before we think for ourselves to indicate as much. Then again, we may be better poised than past generations to understand how these things work, and thus to undermine them. I’m not even sure what our politics are, then, along the traditional spectrum. Our is the politics of more.

A president should not be graded for his success on how many bills he got passed. That is often a measure of whether his party has majorities in Congress, whether the nation perceives foreign threats, and other variables. It also is to assume that the bills that were passed were good bills. Often it takes a little time to determine the impact of legislation.To say that “I do think Obama is the most successful president in recent history” is a bit premature. But then, the way-too-soon anointing of Obama is all part of what liberal columnist Dana Milbank calls the “Cult of Obama,” people whose belief in his “transformative” being leads them into over-the-top assertions against patent evidence to the contrary.