Obama and the Millennials

In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 percent–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.”
Post–World War II America was a nation of big units: The leaders of big government, big business, and big labor made decisions and provided security for those in their organizations.
If you went to college, you could go into management or a profession and expect a lifetime of good earnings and a comfy pension. If you got a factory job, it was for life, and unions bargained for ever-higher wages and benefits.
That’s not the America we live in anymore. Government has grown bigger. But big business doesn’t generate jobs; most are created by small businesses and startups. Unions have shrunk, and most union members are public employees.


Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328581/obama-and-millennials-michael-barone