Michael Barone devotes his latest Washington Examiner column to what the headline describes as “Obama’s war on young voters who elected him.”
In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin. Among older voters, Obama led McCain by 50 to 49 percent.
How has Obama paid back the Millennial generation, which provided almost all his margin of victory? With what American Interest superblogger Walter Russell Mead calls “Obama’s war on the young.”
Mead is not a Tea Party crazy or Ayn Rand zealot. He is a history professor at Bard College and an expert on American foreign policy. He voted for Obama in 2008, and he’s not wild about Mitt Romney this year.
Nevertheless, he argues persuasively that America is undergoing a “transformation from [a[ late-stage industrial society to [an] early-stage information society [that] is disruptive and painful but ultimately liberating and benign.” …
… Obama’s policies, from Obamacare to high-speed rail, treat people as identical cogs in a very large machine, part of a mindless mass who would not be able to get along without government guidance.
In the information age, these industrial-age policies have prevented the vibrant economic growth, which gives young people the opportunity to find work and community service that maximizes their own special talents and interests — to shape their own world and choose their own future.
