Why Young People Are Turning on Obama
As I write at The Daily Beast, between 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama pulled 2.4 million fewer votes from voters between the ages of 18 and 29. New polls shows that 54 percent of that group disapprove of the job he's doing as president. Wha happened?
The abysmal and pathetic launch of healthcare.gov is simply the cherry on top of a shit sundae Obama's been whipping up for the kids. You can protest that the stimulus should have been bigger, but when you judge its success against what the Obama administration claimed it would do, it was an epic fail. While masquerading as the peace and freedom candidate – easy to do against such hawkish characters as Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in the general election – Obama prided himself on tripling troop strength in Afghanistan and tried to extend our stays there and in Iraq. But for the vocal pushback from Rand Paul, Justin Amash, and a bunch of younger, non-interventionist Republicans, there's every reason that the U.S. would have started an unsanctioned war in Syria, just as it did in Libya (where things are working out…how, again?)….
The president has been genuinely awful on pot legalization and dragged his feet on gay marriage – issues on which younger voters are in front of the general population – and he spent his first term deporting more immigrants than George W. Bush managed to in eight years (despite minor reprieves announced in time for the 2012 elections, the deportations keep on happening). The revelations of widespread, Obama-approved drone strikes, the compilation of a presidential kill list, and the data collection of phone logs and internet traffic don't exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feelings from a generation that lives online. His response to the Gulf oil spill was dithering to non-existent and his alt-energy plans have come to naught even as fracking has put the country on a path to something like energy independence. And clandestine attempts to expand onerous copyright laws and outlaw cellphone unlocking via the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty aren't helping either.