Baby Boomers

We've talked about how young voters are more progressive, more apt to to support democratic candidates, and are one of the age groups that supports the President's push for health care reform. Its not surprising then, that the majority of the Teabagger Community is made up of people over the age of 30.

"Young voters are not going away. There is a greater chance that the people in those tea party photos will see far fewer birthdays than the 18-to-30-year-olds who seem to have very little in common with graying protestors.

Why does this demographics shift matter? Here is an example why: When it became clear that the health care reform package might include a 5 percent tax on multimillionaires, conservative boomers went mad ... and 18-to-30-year-olds yawned.

Why? They don't have sympathy invested into the plight of millionaires. Unlike their parents, they never bought into the "trickle down" myth. That was where taxpayers were supposed to give more money to millionaires in hopes that some of that money would trickle down to the pockets of the average American."

Its true. And in a previous post by Craig, we see 61 percent of 18-29 year olds support a government run health care program. Similarly, in a piece by the LA Times

"Adults 18 to 29 are the group most supportive of President Obama's plan to overhaul healthcare, according to a recent poll by SurveyUSA."

The PNJ post continues to say that young people regard Teabaggers as inspiration for laughs on the Daily Show, which makes the entire movement to a generation quite simply a joke.

"We were a generation that believed it was OK for Henry Kravis to make $54,000 an hour while 47 million people live below the poverty line on less than $12,000 a year. [Millennial] voters are repulsed by such a reality. . .

"So it's no wonder that the new GOP, defined by Granddad's "anti-" movement, has even less appeal to young voters who hope to change most everything that appealed to Granddad."

My friend Ezra Klein, Millennial heath wonk wunderkind, takes a shot at the question, "What will happen with health reform?"

He sets up the answer as an analogy to the jobs recovery bill and concludes:

The result will probably be a historic win when compared to the status quo, but I doubt it's going to feel like that for supporters of the initiative.

There is no small irony here. A major progressive thought-leader on healthcare reform is saying that he thinks we'll secure a major victory but that many progressives will not embrace it.

Reading Ezra this morning (whose sentiments I think are spot-on), I remembered another recent conversation I had with another Millennial leader whose work is mostly outside the youth-engagement community. He understood the frustrations of his many Boomer and Xer compatriots upset at the Obama Administration over some footdragging, but thought that his older friends didn't really "get it." The Obama Administration got handed one of the biggest piles of shit in history and are cleaning it up as quickly as they can and lots of different things: global warming, getting out of Iraq, equal rights, voting reform, etc., have taken a temporary backburner while we try to fix the economy and get our healthcare system sorted out. We're still in Year One of an Administration and major things are happening.

This same divide is one I've witnessed with Forward Montana's grassroots healthcare work in Montana. Our efforts come under fire by many of our traditional advocacy allies because we aren't demanding single-payer, but we repeatedly go back to the 18-30 year-olds who comprise our base and ask what they care about and single-payer has yet to come up in one of those conversations. Support for Max Baucus's white paper actually runs pretty high among our crowd.

Now, I should say that I'm not sure who is right: the older activists or my Millennial peers. But these different viewpoints highlight something else we've all long suspected about our younger activists rising through the ranks -- we are far more comfortable with working within institutions and accepting the defenses of elites than our predecessors in the activist world.

There are, of course, exceptions. Young activists don't just mimic Jane Fleming Kleeb, we also have David Sirota in our ranks. And it is also possible that this divide simply mirrors long-running divides between the young who would go into elected office and the young who are better situated to raining criticism down on the powers that be. To some extent, of course, we need both.

Andrew Sullivan's coverage of the Iran election mess has been fantastic. One of his posts touched on something we've been writing about at Future Majority for quite some time, and that's the comparison of Millennial activism to the Boomer activism of the 1960s.

Sullivan put forth the observation that Millennials are revolutionary - causing healthy societal turmoil when needed - and doing so quietly, with the use of technology. Tom Friedman - eat your heart out:

It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks. That's why they didn't see what those of us surgically attached to modems could spot a mile away: something was happening in Iran. If Drum is right, the mullahs believed their own propaganda about victory until reality hit them so hard so fast, they miscalculated badly and over-reached.

The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.

This generation will determine if the world can avoid the apocalypse that will come if the fear-ridden establishments continue to dominate global politics, motivated by terror, armed with nukes, and playing old but now far too dangerous games. This generation will not bypass existing institutions and methods: look at the record turnout in Iran and the massive mobilization of the young and minority vote in the US. But they will use technology to displace old modes and orders. Maybe this revolt will be crushed. But even if it is, the genie has escaped this Islamist bottle.

Maybe that's what we're hearing on the rooftops of Tehran: the sound of the next revolution.

Like my last post, this message had been stuck somewhere between common sense and the lazy journalism of the first part of this decade for a while. But somewhere around 2008 folks began to understand what this quiet revolution meant. No longer do revolutions solely consist of walking the streets of our small towns and big cities with placards while chanting. No longer do revolutions solely consist of conducting sit-ins and supplanting order with chaos. Instead, this new revolution transforms the subculture from within. Millennials actually trust institutions to make change. And in Iran, perhaps this whole election debacle wouldn't be so alarming to us in the West if the youth hadn't turned out in such record numbers. But they did. And they were able to partly because of their knowledge of and proficiency in using technology.

Yes, this is the same technology many a critic has lambasted as ineffective, because it seemed so passive to them. Perhaps they should take a note from the past year and a half and read Sullivan's coverage of Iran's election this week.

This is a quiet revolution. But be assured - the transformation will be breathtaking. And Sullivan's right - we owe a big thank you to technology.

Winston Churchill famously said "If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” It's a line that is often quoted back to me on political blogs when I try to make the case for a political realignment brought on by today's increasingly progressive youth. Commenters often like to refute my thesis by stating that political views change, and most people become more conservative as they grow older. But is that really the case?

A new study by the New American Foundation, The Millennial Pendulum, attempted to answer that question by examining data comparing the political views of Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials at similar points in their life cycle. What the found bodes well for those of us expecting Millennials to usher in a political realignment in favor of progressive government.

In a nutshell, the report identifies three causes behind political and ideological identity, and weights them in an attempt to determine which, if any, play a dominant and predictive role

1. Age effects: Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” Leaving aside Churchill’s value-judgment, this could be an accurate developmental theory. Perhaps people grow more conservative as they move through life. Indeed, cross-sectional snapshots comparing younger vs. older adults within an era support Churchill’s view. Compared to contemporary elders, younger adults tend to be more open to the ideas that are swirling at a particular time and typically are more critical in their commitments and tactics.

2. Period/Historical Effects: It could be common for everyone in a population (regardless of when they were born) to change their opinions at the same time, in response to major events such as economic crises, social movements, pivotal elections, or political leaders. For example, many individuals—regardless of how old they were at the time—may have moved to the left in the 1960s and to the right in the 1980s. And, in the wake of 9/11, Americans of all ages were supportive of national security measures.

3. Cohort effects: It could be that people born around the same time are permanently influenced by events, movements, or leaders that arise when they are young and impressionable, so that their generation acquires a durable ideological character that is still evident decades later. For instance, people who came of age in time to fight in World War One were always more alienated and prone to radicalism than those who came before or after.

The authors of the study note that political realignment is most likely if #3, cohort effects, are found to be the dominant factor in the formation of political and ideological identity:

The potential for a realignment will be greatest today if cohort effects dominate, because then we might be seeing an “Obama Generation” that will vote for progressive candidates for 50 years to come. Of course, it will matter how they define “progressive” politics—what particular issues and positions motivate them. If age effects or historical effects are more important, then a progressive realignment is less likely.

The authors than mapped the opinions of Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and occasionally older generations (when data were available) across four major categories: self-declared political identity, issue preferences, confidence in major institutions, and social/moral issues.

The results of these comparisons will come as no surprise to those who regularly read this blog. On almost all issues, Millennials show a stronger progressive bent than do previous generations, even when they were the same age.

The political attitudes and policy preferences of Millennials reinforce their liberal self-concept. They are far less likely than their elders and than the other generations when they were young to feel that the government wastes a lot of money. They had more progressive attitudes than the general population on federal aid to schools and were just as likely as the eldest respondents to say that the government should provide universal health insurance. Not only do these positions reflect progressive sentiments, they also are relevant for discussions of a new social contract.

The one area in which this proved to be untrue was providing equal opportunity to all individuals, something quite difficult to square with their very progressive opinions on everything from affirmative action to gay marriage:

Contrary to the generally liberal pattern, a lower proportion of the Millennial generation endorsed the belief that society should do anything necessary to guarantee equality of opportunity. This item refers to “society” and not the government or state. Nonetheless, it is difficult to square with the Millennials’ otherwise progressive dispositions.

On virtually every other issue or measure of political identity/engagement, however, they are more progressive than their elders, and these trends are likely to hold over time as Millennials age into the electorate:

So does the Millennials’ enthusiasm for Obama and their more liberal attitudes outlined in this report portend a sea change in the future political landscape? Although people tend to become more conservative as they age and settle into roles (steady job, marriage, family), where they stand in young adulthood is a good barometer of their political views later on. The trends discussed in this paper suggest that, as the Millennials replace their elders, we should expect a greater openness to the role of government in providing services and addressing public problems, more confidence in the branches of government, increasing support for the civil liberties of diverse groups, and an increasing identification with service to the community as an integral aspect of personal identity.

In other words, Churchill was wrong. Cohort effects are dominant, while age effects and period/historical effects are relegated to a smaller role when it comes to political and ideological identity. Sorry Winston.

Hope you are all having a better holiday than me. I've been sick as a dog and mostly useless since Friday morning.

• CQ Politics profiles Henry Waxman, congressional watchdog and the new chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman is likely to be a big ally in passing bold energy policy this year.
• Despite problems with the exit polls, word is trickling in that young voters in Colorado came out big and like their peers in most states, went for Obama.
• Ari Melber at The Nation has a few thoughts about Obama for America 2.0.
• Looking back on Obama for America 1.0, you should read this lengthy interview with campaign manager David Plouffe if you have not already done so.
• At CNN.com, Marian Salzman discusses intra-generational politics within the Baby Boomers, and how Obama represents a changing of the generational guard.
• Meanwhile, the Washington Post delves into generational politics in this piece about the "Madoff Generation."

Sorry for the light posting. I'm in an administrative hell today between emails, phone calls, and figuring out my final paperwork for my work on Future Majority this year. I should have something more substantive up soon.

• DMI Scholars is seeking applicants for their next summer institute. For those who don't know this is DMI Scholars third year of operation and they run a kick-ass Policy 101 Bootcamp during the summer.
• You might remember a few months ago I posted about Patchwork Nation, a project of the Christian Science Monitor to geographically break down the electorate into useful categories. Well they just revisited it and found that in all but 2 of their 11 geographic categories, the youth vote went for Obama. The only two areas where youth voted for McCain were in "Military Bastions" and "Emptying Nests."
• At Millennials Changing America, Alex Steed has an interesting take on the supposed Millennial/Boomer divide, and suggests that age is not the best indicator of someone's generation. Interesting reading in light of our discussions about whether or not we have a youth movement or an ideological movement of which youth are a driving force.

Two articles caught my eye today. The first, from AFP, was headlined: US Election Shapes Up As Duel of Generations.

About 44 million young people between the age of 19 and 29 will be able to vote in November, according to a recent Gallup opinion poll. Sixty-five percent of them say they plan to vote for Obama, compared to only 31 percent who plan to do so for McCain.

But among those aged 65 and over, McCain and Obama are statistically tied, 44 to 45 percent respectively.

Seniors traditionally have high turnout rates -- 72 percent voted in 2004 -- while young voters are have historically been fickle and unreliable.

The age difference also marks the candidates' style. During the television debates, McCain, 72, quoted Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, while Obama, 47, referred to Google.

On Sunday former secretary of state and military leader Colin Powell endorsed Obama, calling for the need for "generational" change.

"I think we need a transformational figure, I think we need a generational change. That is why I'm supporting Senator Obama," Powell said in an interview with NBC.

While the story is much more evenhanded than the title (ie - blame the editors, not the reporter), the entire framework of generational warfare is unnecessarily antagonistic and troubling, for numerous reasons. First, I think it is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate. Second, I see it as a potential narrative device for the Right to delegitimize an Obama win, oppose a legislative agenda that conflicts with its own, and it lays the groundwork for driving a wedge between Democrats and young voters. Let's pick this apart a bit.

First, let's deal with the inaccuracy. Here's a look at the actual Gallup data referenced in the story:

Yes, voters under 30 overwhelmingly prefer Obama, but every age demographic in the Gallup data favors Obama, even if within the margin of error. If there was a real generational battle brewing, I would expect seniors to be as lopsidedly for McCain as youth are for Obama. That's not happening. What we are seeing is the growth of a potential electorate-wide mandate, not an inter-generational duel.

I think what this piece also misses is that young voters today don't want anything to do with a generational battle or duel. We're in the middle of two wars with mounting casualties, few indicators of success, and our friends fighting on the front lines; the economy is tanking at a time when good entry level jobs that provide health care and the opportunity to pay off our school debt are already fewer and further between; the planet is getting hotter and our nation's energy policy is the very definition of insanity.

That's a lot to take on, and if we're going to make any progress at all we will need to build intergenerational alliances with Gen Xers, Boomers, and the Silent Generation. Like the AARP says - Divided We Fail.

After all, isn't that what the Obama campaign has been all about? Moving beyond ideology and partisanship. Reaching out to all Americans to roll up our sleeves and Get. Shit. Done. You can argue whether or not Obama, in this respect, represents a new reality or just new rhetoric, but it's hard to argue with the sentiment and expressed intent of the electorate in poll after poll, news story after news story.

Unfortunately, even if young people aren't looking to engage in generational warfare, the narrative is out there, and conservatives are already leaping to take advantage of it. Which brings us to the second point, and the other article I want to reference, this time an op-ed column in today's Washington Post by Robert Samuelson:

Young Voters, Get Mad

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, October 22, 2008; Page A19

To: Voters Under 35
Subject: Your Future
Recommendation: Get Angry

You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health costs for state and local workers have doubtlessly been underestimated. There's the expense of decaying infrastructure -- roads, bridges, water pipes. All this will squeeze other crucial government services: education, defense, police.

Samuelson is a right-of-center pundit who frequently writes about "entitlement" reform - one of the few areas where conservatives perceive they have an "in" with young voters - often under the guise of "helping out" young people. His arguments are very much in line with the work of organizations like Americans for Generational Equality, who stoke intergenerational strife to advance their policy agenda.

At Pushback, Matt Zeitlin gets to the heart of what Samuelson is hoping to achieve:

Robert Samuelson has written one of the most annoying types of column today, one in which he self-righteously exhorts the young to march in lockstep behind his own agenda of cutting benefits and restricting eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. Before he suggests that we young people picket the AARP (seriously), he makes all sorts of misleading claims about how baby boomers are screwing us juveniles:

Conservatives are on the brink of losing big in the upcoming election. Even before the dust settles, one of the first things they will realize is that the electoral math has changed, and they are going to need to appeal to a greater segment of youth to blunt the Democratic advantage. This intergenerational warfare narrative - focusing on "entitlement reform" - will be the wedge they try to drive between moderate Millennials and the Democratic Party. Barring radical shifts to the left in their policy proposals on the environment, military spending, and health care, it's pretty much the only card they've got.

In the coming days and months - probably as soon as exit polls are released on November 4th - this is a narrative against which we are going to have to push back hard.

This is a guest post by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, the authors of Millennial Makeover. --Mike

As admirers of Curtis Gans' research on voter turnout, it pained us to read his Baby Boomer-oriented screed attacking the Millennial Generation, even denying the existence of the Millennials, for not acting exactly like the Boomers did when they were young. Aging Boomers like Tom Friedman have made the same public mistake, demonstrating just how convinced many leading thinkers among the Boomer Generation are that the political style of young people today is not like their own youthful political behavior was and is, therefore, not appropriate or useful. While it would be easy to address this error by simply commenting admiringly on Mike Connery’s excellent blog dissecting Gans' diatribe, the egregious nature of Gans' comments warrants a more fulsome response.

Since Gans' research report was focused on, in his words, the increased, “almost record,” turnout in this year’s presidential primaries, it is particularly surprising that he chose this vehicle to announce his distaste for the Millennial Generation and its political style. Gans cites the work of William Damon as the source of his knowledge about this generation, which is strange given the large number of more well-documented studies of the Millennial Generation disproving Damon’s contention that the parents of Millennials are “creating a generation of young people who lack confidence and direction.” The evidence shows just the opposite. If anything, employers and teachers who interact daily with Millennials complain that they are almost too confident, to the point of sounding “cheeky.”

This generation's self-confidence and orientation toward the group and the broader society has important political implications. Recent polling data from USAToday/CNN demonstrate that Millennials are paying close attention to the 2008 election and have every intention of voting, at numbers rivaling those of older voters. Their survey of more than 900 young Americans, taken Sept. 18-28 found that:

• 75 % of Millennials are registered to vote
• 73% plan to vote
• 64% have given "quite a lot" of thought to the election

Even Gans concedes that Millennials may vote in large numbers in this election. But he says that they will do so only because of their fondness for Senator Barack Obama and not because of any long-term commitment to the political process. Millennials he says

“were brought in by the uniqueness of Obama’s candidacy—precisely because he seemed to offer something different than the politics they had been eschewing.” He continues, “they won’t stay in if he’s not elected and their interest and engagement won’t be sustained if he does not live up to the promise of his candidacy once in office.”

Gans makes this assertion in spite of having no data to support it.

There is no doubt that Millennials have responded very positively to Senator Obama and his candidacy and that the Obama campaign has strongly targeted this generation. Millennials supported Obama overwhelmingly in this year's Democratic primaries and virtually all current general election surveys indicate that Millennials favor him over John McCain by at least a 2:1 margin.

But the political attitudes and identifications of Millennials were clearly evident long before the Obama candidacy gained widespread visibility. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2007 indicated that Millennials identified as Democrats over Republicans by nearly a 2:1 ratio (52% vs. 30%). And, a study conducted at about the same time by the Millennial Strategy Program of communication research and consultation firm Frank N. Magid Associates showed that Millennials were the first generation since at least the GI Generation to contain a greater number of self-perceived liberals than conservatives. All of this at least raises the possibility that the high level of Millennial political involvement is significantly based on the Democratic and liberal affinities of the generation and would be strong even without Obama's strong candidacy.

Gans makes it clear why he is sure that the political involvement of Millennials stems solely from their attachment to Barack Obama. He yearns for the “idealistic activism” of the 1950s and 1960s when, according to Gans, all of America shared a “different ethos” thanks to an educational system based “on John Dewey’s philosophy.” Since, in Gans' mind, the emerging Millennial Generation doesn’t share the liberal idealism of his own youth, it cannot possibly sustain its current level of political activity. If only it were so, Curtis.

In fact, the ideological ferment of the late 1960s, led by half of the Baby Boomer Generation’s counter-cultural rebellion against authority, and the reaction against this social turmoil by the other half of Boomer Generation, produced the political gridlock that caused the very cynicism in the older portions of the electorate that Gans decries. Even his own expert on the Millennial Generation, William Damon, concedes that Millennials “are working hard, doing well enough in school, and staying out of trouble.” Indeed, America is enjoying far lower levels of socially deviant behavior, such as teen age pregnancy and crime, since these indicators began to soar during the adolescent years the Baby Boomer Generation with its disdain for social rules and convention.

But Gans' own words demonstrate the flaw in his thinking. The 1950s that he writes about so nostalgically was actually an era dominated by the behavior and ethos of the GI Generation, another “civic” generational archetype, just like Millennials, not by his beloved Boomers. That generation put FDR in the White House, brought about the New Deal approach to progressive government, defeated fascism in WWII, and voted at rates greater than those of previous generations. Their Democratic loyalty lasted a lifetime: the last remaining members of the GI Generation and the first sliver of Millennials provided the only pluralities for John Kerry over George W. Bush among any of the generational cohorts voting in 2004.

The previous falloff in voting by young people described by Gans in his diatribe is completely explained by the generational attitudes and behaviors of Boomers and Gen-Xers as they moved into and out of young adulthood. One generation, Boomers, initially turned out to vote spurred by admirable idealism and then often left the political process when they discovered in Gans’ telling phrase, that “their leaders showed feet of clay.” The other, Generation X, never bothered to participate in large numbers having been discouraged by the political gridlock Boomers had created. Now that Millennials make up the entire population of voters 26 and under in this election, you can be assured that they will not only vote at rates comparable to older voters, just like their GI Generation great-grandparents did, but they will also continue to vote heavily and participate vigorously in the nation’s political process for the rest of their lives.

They will do so, because unlike Curtis Gans and his ilk, who never were able to translate their idealism into action, Millennials are intent on working together to create a better America than the one Boomers have left them as an inheritance. Their confidence, political activism, and unity will begin to initiate that change on Election Day this year thanks to a record turnout of young voters. The 1.7 million vote plurality given to John Kerry by young voters in 2004 will grow to between 8 and 10 million for Barack Obama when this involved and unified generation goes to the polls on November 4. Only Curtis Gans and out of touch Boomers will be surprised.

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum conference today and tomorrow. I’ll be live blogging from some sessions later in the day. In the meantime, I want to remind you to please spread the word about our new user-blogs, and post up a few links that you might have missed this weekend:

• George Carlin, champion of free speech, is dead.. That sucks.
• The always interesting Colin Delaney (who I’m sure is here in the room somewhere) injects a little realism into the discussion in these 7 Lessons from the Obama Campaign.
• Screw the Millennials. Charlie Cook thinks this election is all about white, male, Baby Boomers. (I of course disagree).
• Most voters believe McCain is too old to be President, but younger voters are more accepting of his age than older voters.
• GOP youth are trying to put together their own convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul this summer.
• Obama made the news twice this week. First for withdrawing from the campaign finance system. Act Blue weighs-in on that decision (in favor of Obama’s decision). Second, Obama came out in support of the FISA “compromise.” Greg Sargent and Glenn Greenwald weigh-in on why this was extremely disappointing.

Harpers is running an interview with Sydney Blumenthal about his new book. During the interview, they got around to discussing the youth vote.

Shorter Blumenthal: they didn't turnout historically, probably won't this year, and if they do it won't be as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be:

4. In your analysis of the transformation of the electorate that brought the Democrats victory in 2006, you focus on the youth vote and note its sharp trajectory into the Democratic camp. Do you consider this to be a stable pillar on which to build a new Democratic majority? Young voters are not only less inclined to actually vote than other age groups, they are also famously fickle in their political attitudes. Isn’t it in fact only natural that a carefree college student will embrace liberal attitudes from which a later white-collar worker with a mortgage and children may turn?

The younger generation, responding to Bush’s radicalism, is emerging as a liberal one. Its development may be part of a natural cycle as the children of a liberal generation, just as their parents were children of the New Deal generation. Bush has been the formative experience in their political education. Yet the idea that the entrance of a new generation of young people will suddenly transform American politics is by now among the oldest, most romantic and least persuasive notions of so-called “new politics.” Proposed in the aftermath of the 1968 election, many Democrats pinned their hopes on the youth vote. That generation, my own, was and still is the largest numerically and proportionally in American history. Rather than try to analyze the internal reasons why the Democratic Party had come apart in the late 1960s, theorists suggested that a new generation would rescue the Democrats as a political deus ex machina. In a 1971 book, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s, Frederick G. Dutton, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, wrote: “Voter turnout increases with education, affluence, political awareness and social influence, and those attributes are all demonstrably higher in the coming generation than in any other new voting group in history.” This idea was one of the key underlying assumptions of the George McGovern candidacy in 1972. (McGovern, alas, lost 49 states.) A 1970 book, The New Majority, by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, describing the Republican sources of power as the “unyoung, unpoor and unblack” proved more prescient.

Voters under 30 during this campaign year have had a greater impact within Democratic primaries in terms of numbers and influence than they will in the general election. The Pew poll of May 8 now shows a growing generation gap, though “modest by the standards of the 1960s.” Yet a majority of those over 50 years old, according to Pew, do not share younger voters’ view, for example, of Barack Obama as “inspiring” or even as “patriotic.”

The “new politics” promising a youth-led renaissance, the transcendence of partisanship and the withering away of social need through the greening of America ended in tears 35 years ago. It’s a dream that apparently defies its repeated deaths.

I've got to disagree with Blumenthal. First off, the Boomers were not, contrary to popular belief, a liberal generation. Their values may have differed greatly from that of their parents, but as a generation they did not vote monolithically as we're seeing young people do today. Boomers are a split generation whose members have clashed for decades. That's what the culture war is . . .

Second, he assumes that young people today - their motivations, their engagement, the size of their generation, the mood of the electorate - are the same as back in '68 and in all those other elections when young people failed to turnout. This, fortunately, is not the case. Young voters are voting largely as a single voting block - a trend whose strength will only increase during the general election when Obama picks up Clinton's supporters. Thanks to new online tools like YouTube and FaceBook and MyBarackObama.com, engagement is easier, higher, and more effective than ever. Thanks to real field campaigns by third party groups and Students for Barack Obama, young voters are being incorporated into campaigns like we haven't seen in decades - since even before 1968, when LBJ kicked the college democrats out of the party. Obama's new 50-state voter registration plan will only amplify these trends.

Millennials are also a larger generation than the Baby Boom and this year it is highly likely that their turnout will top the record 55% set in 1972. I would argue that what we've seen in the primaries thus far isn't an outsized influence from young voters, but rather just a taste of what youth participation will be in November.

The generations are very different as well. As Strauss and Howe outlined in their work, and as Winograd and Hais just elucidated in their new book, Millennial Makeover, Boomers were an idealist generation. Their involvement in politics has been largely personal (moral), and outside the system. They rebelled against their civic-minded parents. Millennials are the opposite. they are a civic generation that prizes participation within the system and community engagement. Comparing the two generations is like apples and oranges.

Shorter me: This isn't 1968, '72, or '84. Millennials are different than their Boomer and Xer predecessors. Blumenthal's ideas are equally out of date.