The pessimists among you will welcome Jim McTague‘s latest “D.C. Current” column for Barron’s, in which he ponders the potential impact of the Obama administration’s recent scandals on the young people who have endorsed the president so wholeheartedly for the past five years.
Obama hopes to take back the House from the GOP in 2014 so he can push the rest of his agenda through Congress, as he did with Obamacare. To do this, he needs to keep in place his the get-out-the-vote machinery that helped him obliterate GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney last year. That includes major efforts to keep voters aged 18-32 interested and involved in politics. This so-called millennial generation, which includes whites, blacks, and Latinos, gave Obama the winning edge in 2008 and 2012. …
… Will the young voters tune out because of the scandals? Michael Hais and Morley Winograd, who have written three well-received books on the millennials and their impact on the Democratic Party, believe the scandals will have almost no effect on this generation. For one thing, the millennials do not share their parents’ suspicions of big, intrusive government. Hais and Winograd say that the millennials see a role for the federal government to set down rules of behavior, like parents, for them to follow.
WHAT ABOUT THE JUSTICE Department’s seizure of AP’s phone records? Millennials don’t appreciate the concept of a “fourth estate.” They don’t read newspapers. They glean their information from social media. A book about millennials published last year by Paula Poindexter, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that millennials describe the news as “garbage, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring.” Furthermore, she said, they don’t feel that being informed is important.
McTague holds out hope that young voters who don’t pay attention to news will at least notice the impact of Obama’s policies on their paltry job prospects, a phenomenon documented regularly by the group Generation Opportunity.
