Obama Brings Claims of GOP War on the Poor to Campus Campaign Swing
By Chris Stirewalt
Published April 24, 2012
FoxNews.com


Obama Takes Different Tone With College Students than 2008

“76 percent”

-- Portion of North Carolina voters ages 25 to 29 that voted for Barack Obama in 2008

In 2008, President Obama won voters under the age of 30 by a staggering 34 points and boosted turnout for the 18-to-29 set compared to the two previous elections.

Obama did more than twice as well with young voters and got more young voters to the polls than other recent Democratic candidates.

Obama can credit his victory to having narrowly won with the 66 percent of voters between ages 30 and 64, but his awesome performance with young voters not only offset the opposition of roughly similar number of voters over the age of 65, but also provided Obama’s cushion in the popular and electoral votes.

Consider North Carolina where Obama will today kick off a three-state, two-day campaign tour across swing-state university campuses. Obama won by three-tenths of a percent in the final tally, but pulled 74 percent of the 18 percent of voters under the age of 30.

Obama still would have won the presidency without North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes and still would have won the popular vote without beating John McCain two-to-one with voters under 30, but young voters were also key to developing Obama’s “cool” brand.

Who knows how many Baby Boomers were nudged into the Obama column by seeing the shining optimism and unalloyed enthusiasm of their college-student children? In youth-obsessed America, it’s usually preferable to be standing with the youngsters and not the geezers.

The same kind of grassroots support Obama is now paying dearly to recreate stemmed naturally from young voters who believed that they were part of a movement that would forever change American politics.

Except that it didn’t. The political discourse is worse, not better than when Obama took office. Race relations are worse, not better than when Obama took office. Obama blames Republicans for becoming more wicked and less worthy of efforts at compromise, but that itself sounds like something a typical politician would say.

These voters are also a big part of why Obama has been so anxious about his reversals on Bush administration war policies. Middle-aged voters may be relieved that Congress blocked Obama from closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay or that Obama has expanded the Bush administration’s covert war efforts via drones, but those things didn’t do much to keep youthful hopes alive.

Obama is more than two years into a limited Afghan surge that has gone very poorly and yielded many American casualties. That’s probably not where a lot of young voters would have imagined Obama going when they cast their ballots for him in 2008.

The biggest problem for the president with young voters, though, has to be the fact that they have suffered the most in the puny economy since Obama took office.

An Associated Press study out this week found a 53.6 percent rate of unemployment and underemployment among adults under age 25 with college degrees. More American adults are living with parents than at any time since 1950 and student loan debt recently topped $1 trillion.

The 19-year-old senior who voted for Obama on a platform of hope and change who is now working as a barista, living with mom and unable to repay college loans at any rate may have trouble conjuring the same dewy idealism that Obama once tapped.

Obama will also campaign this week in Colorado and Iowa, states that like North Carolina, have large numbers of college students and young adults.

(He is able to have taxpayers cover the cost of the campaign swing because his topic, extending a $6 billion-per-year program that subsidizes student loans for lower-income college students. The stimulus provision is set to expire on July 1, and since Obama is talking about pending legislation, he can say he is on official business, not campaigning, and not have to pay for the travel from his re-election fund.)

As he rolls out, he finds his Gallup approval rating among voters under 30 running 10 points behind his 2008 election performance. Much worse, though, is the fact that voter enthusiasm for this group has cratered. In February, Gallup found voter enthusiasm for the under 30 set down 28 points to 48 percent as compared to the same point in 2008.

Obama will still win the youth vote, but it looks like he is unlikely to do so by the massive margins of 2008. But the more serious concern is that youth turnout may shrink and that these young voters won’t be foot soldiers knocking on doors and leaning on their parents and grandparents to vote for that cool, transformative guy.

With Obama unlikely to fare so well with middle-aged voters this time, the youth vote has taken on new importance. Even if Obama can’t recreate the magic of 2008, he needs to do at least as well with the 18-to-29 year olds as John Kerry and Al Gore.

That’s why he’s not out talking about transforming Washington and bringing hope to the nation this week. He’s out with a narrow message tailored to lower-income students which says that Mitt Romney and the Republicans are trying to take away their subsidized tuitions and that they need to vote for Obama so that he protect that money.


And Now, A Word From Charles

“The numbers today talk about the difficulty of the entitlement programs in terms of years. But the more accurate way I think that you look at it is how much is spent every year and how much is coming in?

Medicare shells out $560 billion every year. It covers less than half of that with premiums and with taxation. So more than half of that it comes from the Treasury, which has no money of its own. That money comes from China. Every year, almost $300 billion every year it adds to the deficit. That is a quarter of the entire deficit on Medicare.”

-- Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

Obama Brings Claims of GOP War on the Poor to Campus Campaign Swing; Fox News