To anyone reading this blog it is apparent that I more or less lost all faith in President Obama and the Congressional Democrats to deliver on their campaign promises to LGBT Americans. Hence my support of the "Don't Ask, Don't Give" campaign. But increasingly it looks like gays are hardly alone in feeling that they were lied to and given false promises. Indeed, the Obama administration's across the board failure to deliver is driving away the youth vote according to a new Newsweek story. It is hard to believe that Obama and Congressional Democrats have turned what had looked like a golden opportunity for real change and utterly botched things up on nearly every front. The spinelessness and disingenuousness has been truly stunning. Obviously, if the Democrats do not do something startling pretty soon, the election debacle that occurred in Virginia last November could well be the preview of a well deserved disaster for the Democrats in November 2010. People need a reason to get involved and vote other than the mere fact that the Dems are not the GOP. Here are some highlights from the Newsweek article:*
Here's something that should make David Axelrod nervous: there are probably more Yankees fans in Massachusetts than there are young people who voted in the Massachusetts Senate special election, which cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority. Just 15 percent of eligible voters under age 30 participated. The numbers were similarly dismal during two other Republican electoral victories from last fall. In the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, just 17 and 19 percent of potential young voters participated, respectively.
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This wasn't just a fluke trifecta of uninspiring elections. It is, rather, part of a nationwide trend toward apathy among Americans under 30. Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP), which regularly polls young people on political issues, found last fall that just 24 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said that they were "politically engaged or politically active," a 19-point drop from a year earlier.
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Young voters, after all, turned out in record numbers for the 2008 election, and if they hadn't, Obama might not be in the White House. But if Democrats don't pass health-care reform, youth turnout may plummet.
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[A] compelling reason to pass health-care reform is being ignored by the party bosses: it could forestall a devastating migration of young voters away from the party and back into political apathy.
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Young Americans are uniquely affected by the nation's broken health-care system. The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that aims to improve health care, found in a report released in December that nearly half of all young adults between 19 and 29 said they were uninsured at some time during the past year. . . . young people remain the group that supports health-care reform at the highest rates. When the Commonwealth Fund asked young respondents whether it was important for Congress and the president to improve the health-care system, 88 percent said yes.
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[Y]oung voters were awestruck by Obama because he was a once-in-a-lifetime candidate who they thought would act on their behalf, not merely because he was a Democrat. If the Democrats drop health care, there will be an entire generation of young voters unable to point to a single major legislative accomplishment from the party during their lifetime. And as far they will be concerned, when it came time for the Democrats to act on an issue that was particularly important to them, they folded.
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"I speculate that a lot of [young people] will think if the Democrats drop the [health-care] bill, that there really isn't any point to engaging through national politics," says Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE, a Tufts University–based organization that studies youth political engagement.
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I truly wonder at times why the Democrats and Obama cannot see that they may well be committing political suicide if they continue their spineless capitulation to the GOP and special interest groups.
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