Obama's Millennial Moment

Bumped. --Mike

In a ceremony fraught with political and generational symbolism, President Barack Obama will sign the aptly named “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” (GIVE) Act (now the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act) today at a White House ceremony, capping his campaign promise to ask Americans to reinvigorate their country through community service. GIVE represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

The support of young voters was decisive in Obama's narrow nomination victory over Hillary Clinton and their 2:1 margin for him over John McCain accounted for 80 percent of his nearly nine million national popular vote lead last November. Like other civic generations in American history, most recently Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” Millennials are defined by their strong desire to advance the welfare of the entire group and, by extension, all of society. This ethos of service among Millennials is strongly supported regardless of gender or party affiliation.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While GIVE enjoyed bi-partisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of GIVE, the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his website, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s signature initiative is drawing Millennials ever closer to his political agenda. Chris Golden and Nick Troiano, Millennial co-founders of myImpact.org, plan on launching a social network designed to connect volunteers and their experiences to others with similar interests as soon as the legislation creates a market for such sharing and support. Two Millennials who served a term in the New Hampshire legislature as they began their college careers, Andrew Edwards and Jeff Fontas, are now anxious to play “a central role in getting a ‘Spirit of Service’ off the ground” as their next step in a career of civic involvement.

Already this generation’s interest in serving, in contrast to its Generation X predecessors, has doubled the proportion of 16-24 year olds participating in the nation’s existing volunteer corps. Ninety-four -percent of Millennials believe community service is an effective way to solve problems at the local level and 85-percent thinks that is true for national problems as well.

At the signing ceremony the President will be joined by Senator Edward Kennedy for whom the Act was named, to celebrate the country’s embrace of our newest civic generation’s ethos of service. While Millennials across the country celebrate this historic change in America’s behavior, Republicans will be left, once again, locked in the dogmas of their past, unable to think back to our country’s last civic era when the GI Bill of Rights sent millions of Millennial’s great-grandparent WWII veterans to college. By exponentially increasing the number of American college graduates and the size of the country's middle class, it paved the way for the long period of post-war growth. If history is any guide, the Millennial Generation will follow in the footsteps of the GI Generation and through its dedication to public service leave America an even stronger country than the one they inherited.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), named one of the 10 favorite books by the New York Times in 2008.