Obama: Not So Cool (Michael Barone)

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.

It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.

Obviously, the Obama campaign strategists are worried that he cannot duplicate his margin among young voters back in 2008, which was 66 to 32 percent.

Recent surveys of young people show inconsistent results. Gallup’s tracking shows Obama leading Mitt Romney 64 to 29 percent, and a Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows him leading Romney 43 to 26 percent among those who said they had an opinion.

But a March survey of 18- to 24-year-olds by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Obama ahead of “a Republican” by only 48 to 41 percent. Only 52 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama, and 43 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

Where the surveys seem to be in accord is that young voters are less engaged, less likely to vote, and less enthusiastic about Obama than in the days when he was proclaiming, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Gallup shows only 56 percent of Americans younger than 30 saying they definitely will vote. Among older Americans, the figure is above 80 percent. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed only 45 percent of young people taking a big interest in the election, down from 63 percent in 2008.

Hispanics and blacks make up a larger share of the millennial generation than of older Americans, and Obama’s support among them seems to remain high. But the Harvard survey shows that only 41 percent of white millennials approve of Obama’s job performance, significantly lower than the 54 percent who voted for him in 2008.

Obama’s decision to campaign — er, conduct official business — on university campuses last week was not surprising. According to exit polls, there was no surge of young voters in 2008. They made up 18 percent of voters, compared with 17 percent in 2004.

But close inspection of the election returns shows that the Obama campaign did a splendid job of ginning up turnout in university and college towns and in singles’-apartment neighborhoods in central cities and close-in suburbs, such as Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington.

Consider the counties where Obama spoke last week. In Orange County, N.C., Obama won 72 percent of the vote. He did better in only one of the state’s 99 other counties: Durham, which has a large black population as well as Duke University.

Obama carried Johnson County, Iowa, with 70 percent of the vote, more than in any of Iowa’s other 98 counties. He carried Boulder County, Colo., with 72 percent, a mark exceeded in that state only in Denver, one rural Hispanic county, and two counties with fashionable ski resorts (Aspen and Telluride).

What Obama doesn’t seem to have done in 2008 is mobilize more economically marginal and educationally limited young people, except perhaps among blacks.

His problem this year is that there are a lot more economically marginal young people, including many who are not educationally limited.

Young people are notoriously transient, and it’s hard for political organizers to track them down — harder perhaps this year, with many recent college graduates unable to find jobs and a rising percentage of young people moving in with their parents.

Few young Americans bothered to vote in Republican primaries, and young people’s attitude toward Mitt Romney seems frosty. They still know little about him.

That gives Romney a chance to argue that Obama’s economic policies have failed and that his own policies can spark an economic revival that will provide myriad opportunities for the iPod/Facebook generation to find satisfying work where they can utilize their special talents.

In his campus speeches, Obama stumped for keeping low interest rates on student loans. But young people may be figuring out that colleges and universities are gobbling up the money that government pours in, leaving them saddled with debt.

It’s a side issue. The Harvard survey showed 58 percent of millennials saying the economy was a top issue and only 41 percent approving Obama’s handling of it. Like Romney, they seem to be saying, “It’s the economy, and we’re not stupid.”

Barone's observations are interesting, but Obama's visits to these particular college campuses last week represent just another of his schitzophrenic re-election tactics, similar to the comedy, campus visits, and TV "performances" to attract the "youth" vote.

His campaign tour of college campuses touting the "non-issue" of the expiring reduced interest rate for college loans already being handled by the Congress and the inference that he is "saving" of that rate for them, together with his unsubstantiated claims about his own difficulty paying off college loans may make for good political theater, but it relies on the naivete and "dumbing down" these students have experienced in their schools.

Submitted here is an example of student reaction to one of his visits yesterday.

Had students been taught that the debtor is slave to the debtholder, and that the role of government is not to enslave people by offering to make them indebted, but to provide a framework of laws to protect their freedom, they might not be attracted to shallow "rock star" style leadership, but would demand someone of substance who would tell them the truth about civilizations's historical struggle for individual freedom and of their own Constitution's limits on power in government.

Sadly, the public schools from which these students came have not taught them the uniqueness of America's founding ideas, but, instead, have propagandized them to accept the idea that "government" exists to "take" from other citizens and "give" to them.

Such students likely will not find jobs available because of the "taking" and "spending" philosophy of the redistributionist policies of the past 3+ years, and decades of government's ignoring Constitutional limits on spending, deficits, and debt.

When, in 1776, our ancestors felt the heavy hand of the British government "taking" their earnings, regulating their lives, interfering with their beliefs, and asserting coercive control over their actions, they did not waste their time on such trivia.

They wrote great treatises such as "Thoughts on Government" and "Common Sense." They educated their young on the merits of liberty, as opposed to slavery to government, and they did the groundwork which allowed for a written Constitution for self-government to be ratified in the states only eleven years later.

America is about to be bankrupt, both financially and philosophically, and those who have benefited from the Founders' ideas, who call themselves "conservators" (conservatives) of those ideas, should come together to place those ideas before millions of young people who must participate in voting in November on whether they desire liberty or slavery. Women, youth, men, so-called "seniors"--all need to have the choice presented clearly that this election pits the ideas of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and America's other Founders against the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Keynes.

There are always "useful idiots." That's what every oppressive regime has relied upon. A "useful idiot" with a big megaphone is more dangerous to liberty than millions of ordinary ones, because of the ability to lull more people into a sense of complacency.

America, awaken! This decades-long battle for your liberty has been engaged. But, for decades, you have allowed the ideas of your liberty to be censored from your nation's textbooks and public discourse.

Your best weapon is contained in your Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which leaves all the power in your hands. Read them, amplify upon their principles and ideas by accessing the Founders' writings and speeches.

For a quick review of those principles and your nation's first 50 years under its Constitution, consult John Quincy Adams' "Jubilee" Address here, or a recent reprint of a 1987 Bicentennial collection of the Founders' principles, here.

James Madison stated: "Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant—they have been cheated; asleep—they have been surprised; divided—the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? ... the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government, they should watch over it ... It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."

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