from the New York Daily News

Barack abandons the young:
The President's policies hurt the generation that put him in office

By James Kirchick

Sunday, November 29th 2009, 4:00 AM

The 2008 presidential race was widely trumpeted as the "Youth Election," and for good reason. Inspired by Barack Obama's relative youth and his message of "hope" and "change," young Americans flocked to the then-junior senator from Illinois.

It is doubtful that he could have become the most powerful man in the world without them.

What did the young get for their critical outpouring of support? Though most of his youthful backers would be hesitant to admit it, the President has betrayed them on three issues of great importance to their wallets and sympathies: health care reform, the federal budget and gay rights.

As the first year of Obama's administration draws to a close, the gap between promise and policy is astonishing, and all the more so considering how critical the young were for his victory. Early primary wins in Iowa and South Carolina owed much to his massive support from voters under 30; in the former state he carried them by a 5-to-1 margin.

That carried over into the general election; the cool, forward-thinking and culturally savvy Obama connected; the rickety John McCain did not.

About 55% of Americans under 30 voted last November, just one percentage point shy of that constituency's all-time turnout high in 1972, and they favored Obama 2-to-1. Despite the perennial talk about the electoral significance of senior citizens – who can always be relied upon to turn up at the polls on Election Day – "Generation Obama" actually comprised a larger portion of the electorate (18%) than did voters over 65 (16%).

But judging by Obama's signature domestic policy goal – his massive expansion of government-subsidized health care to the presently uninsured – you wouldn't suspect that young Americans were such a vital constituency. While the backers of the plan tout it as being "deficit-neutral," it is unlikely to stay so for long. The so-called "public option," a key part of both the House and Senate bills, is modeled on Medicare and Medicaid, two federal programs not exactly known for their fiscal rectitude. Down the road, the new entitlement may well require massive infusions of cash to stay solvent, thus adding to an already enormous national debt with which future generations will have to contend.

But the aspect of the plan that most adversely affects young people is its requirement that most or all Americans purchase health care. Today, young adults comprise about a third of the 46 million Americans who lack it. They are not necessarily suffering; many take a calculated risk that their money is spent better elsewhere, or choose jobs that offer higher salaries as opposed to costly health benefits.

Given the economic difficulties that can overtake someone who faces a medical emergency, universal health care may not be a bad idea in principle. But even then, a basic plan offering catastrophic coverage makes more sense for the young than what Obama is proposing.

Under his plan, young Americans will be forced to pay more than they already do, that is, if they even have health care in the first place. That's because the plan limits the right of insurers to offer cheaper premiums to lower-risk (i.e. younger) customers, and mandates that premiums for older Americans be no more than twice as much as those paid by younger Americans, even though the cost difference between the two sectors is far greater.

Of course, a condition of any humane society is that the young and able-bodied care for the old and infirm. But at present, nearly half of government expenditures go to three entitlement programs that almost entirely benefit the elderly: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

And health care is just part of the dark, looming cloud of national debt. To be sure, Obama does not deserve all of the blame for this dismal fiscal picture. When George W. Bush took office, budget officials predicted that the United States would generate enough revenue to pay off what it owed its creditors by 2010. Rather than continue the policies of his predecessor Bill Clinton, who worked with deficit hawks from both parties in Congress to achieve the first balanced federal budget in 30 years, Bush chose instead to engage in an orgy of domestic spending and reckless tax-cutting.

Obama could have chosen to emulate the budget balancing of the last Democratic President. Instead, he has embraced his party's worst tax-and-spend impulses. Last summer, the deficit reached $1 trillion for the first time in history, and servicing our $12 trillion national debt is estimated to jump to $700 billion a year by 2019 from the present level of $202 billion.

While oncoming economic disaster may be too nebulous a concept for most young people to grasp, especially when many long ago stopped assuming Social Security would be there for them in retirement, the basic equality that our country denies its gay citizens is something far more tangible. Americans under 30 overwhelmingly support gay rights, and the transformational promise of an Obama presidency was a significant reason for his popularity with us. Here again, he has continued to disappoint, with little progress made on efforts to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or the military's odious ban on gays serving openly.

When the states of Maine and Washington held referenda this month to revoke gay marriage and domestic partnership laws respectively, Obama initially couldn't bother to oppose the measures publicly. Only when pressed by a gay magazine did the White House issue a statement. It didn't even mention "Maine" or "Washington."

Given his appealing character and inspirational message, it's not hard to understand why young Americans – not yet burdened by the political cynicism of our elders – flocked to Obama in droves. Yet after nearly a year into his first term, the President has proposed policies that saddle this devoted constituency with debt, penalize us with higher health care costs and dangle beyond our reach the rights we deserve when we happen to have a different sexual orientation.

Politics has always been an insincere business, but this is a very strange way of saying thank you.

james.kirchick@gmail.com

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To any young Obama voter who may have found this page in my website: Greetings. You may have noticed from the other pages in my site that I don't like your hero very much. It's a matter of principle. When I began my military career, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Obama is doing everything possible to destroy the Constitution and the country, so I don't like him.

The truth is, I have no skin in the game, no children or grandchildren to worry about. The worst Obama can do to me is to kill me a few years earlier than nature was going to do it. But you poor suckers - I almost feel sorry for you. You voted him into power and he's going to control your lives for as long as you live. You're going to learn what it was like behind the "Iron Curtain" in socialist paradises like Rumania and Bulgaria. Have a nice life, comrades.