{"id":23050,"date":"2013-11-21T13:46:36","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T18:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23050"},"modified":"2014-10-17T16:18:56","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T20:18:56","slug":"how-obama-lost-young-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/21\/how-obama-lost-young-voters\/","title":{"rendered":"How Obama lost young voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Gillespie<\/a> looks at the remarkable way Barack Obama transitioned from cool to square for one of his key supporting demographic groups:<\/p>\n

Back in 2008, Barack Obama seemed like the coolest cat to hit the national scene in a long time, almost scientifically engineered to appeal to idealistic young Americans. He was the perfect combination of a dream dad and an older brother who could run you ragged up and down the basketball court, wink and nod about smoking dope, and hip you to some older but still cool music, you know? In 2008, the Pravda<\/em> of youth culture, Rolling Stone<\/em>, slathered the future president with praise for being so with it that he even knew how to use…an iPod. We were all pretty sure that his eventual Republican challenger, John McCain, had stopped listening to music when Rudy Vallee went electric or Stephen Foster released his Chris Gaines record or something, but there Obama was, listening to Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, and even Jay-Z. \u201cI have pretty eclectic tastes,\u201d Obama told Rolling Stone<\/em>. He even went on to invoke \u201cMaggie\u2019s Farm,\u201d Dylan\u2019s classic song of generational defiance and opting out. “It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric,” explained.<\/p>\n

Yeah, well, it\u2019s all over now baby blue. Like Bush before him — and in many wars, even worse than Bush before him — Obama has personified the failure of leaders to speak plainly, honestly and directly and to enact simple, effective, financially responsible policies that speak to Americans\u2019 hopes and dreams. The great political continuity in the 21st century is one of transpartisan failure and the continuing flight from party affiliation by more and more Americans.<\/p>\n

Beinart and others like him are right to note that Obama\u2019s and the Democrats\u2019 decline in popularity is not automatically the Republicans\u2019 gain (though get a load of this: Ken Cuccinelli won the 18-24 year-old vote against Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor\u2019s race). But just as there\u2019s no reason to expect the problems with Obamacare to be fixed anytime soon, there\u2019s no reason to think that youth disaffection with the president is going to get better over the remainder of his second term. He\u2019s failed with younger voters not in spite of his policies but because of them. Along the way, he transmogrified from a hipster dad into a near-total drag whose control is as absolute as his inability to get anything right.<\/p>\n

In terms of basic demographics, the future belongs to Millennials because they are young. For good and ill, they will inherit the world their elders made for them. In terms of politics, the future belongs to leaders and parties who not only agree with the record-high percentage of Americans who think the government has too much power but actually propose to give some of it away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Gillespie looks at the remarkable way Barack Obama transitioned from cool to square for one of his key supporting demographic groups: Back in 2008, Barack Obama seemed like the coolest cat to hit the national scene in a long time, almost scientifically engineered to appeal to idealistic young Americans. He was the perfect combination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[158,1000,956,937,504],"class_list":["post-23050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-hipsters","tag-millennials","tag-obamacare","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5ZM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23051,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23050\/revisions\/23051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}