America’s youth vote, who gave an historically high percentage of their support to President Obama in 2008, has soured on him because they are having a hard time finding work and, as a result, are putting off major decisions like getting married and starting a family Obama, who won 66 percent of the 24 million voters ages 18-29 in 2008, has seen that support nose-dive. And in a new poll from Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit that seeks to engage younger voters, only 31 percent approve of Obama’s handling of youth unemployment, a number that threatens to rob the president of the group that pushed him to victory.
“Ironically for President Obama,” said Generation Opportunity’s President Paul Conway, “the hard-core reality is that young voters are now very dissatisfied with the direction of the country and are becoming more vocal in their demands for real jobs rather than promises of more unpaid internships and unproven programs.”
What the GenOp poll provided to Washington Secrets shows is that the nation’s next generation of leaders are extremely concerned about their status in a way previous generations weren’t. Consider: a whopping 77 percent said they are delaying life changes because of economic woes. Of those:
— 44 percent are delaying buying a home.
— 28 percent are delaying saving for retirement.
— 23 percent are delaying starting a family.
— 18 percent are waiting to get married.
“The key issue for young adults is the lack of meaningful choices among full-time jobs that offer an avenue to a stable income, a real career, and the realization of dreams. Instead of genuinely listening to their concerns, they see a president and leaders in Congress who have ignored their strong objections to higher personal taxes, government interference with business, and reckless indebtedness to countries like communist China,” said Conway.
Dems, GOP secretly talk Medicare, tax reform
He won’t name names, but House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., revealed Thursday that he’s meeting with Democrats to chart reforms on Medicare and taxes should President Obama get the boot in November and the GOP take over.
Medicare is his top issue and he said the two sides are “planting the seeds to reap a bipartisan solution after this election because we know it’s not going to happen before.” Pressed to dish on the Democrats, he said, “I’m not going to give you any names to protect the innocent.” But he described them as moderates interested in pushing reforms aimed at pegging benefits to income, meaning the poor get more than the rich, rather than imposing price controls on services.
“We don’t have much time before a crisis hits us,” said Ryan. “You’ve got about two or three years America.”
Larry Korb, friend of homeless
He’s one of Washington’s premier defense experts, often on TV or huddling with generals, but that doesn’t mean Lawrence Korb doesn’t have time for the little guy. In fact, he tells Washington Secrets, Korb goes out of his way to help the littlest of little guys, every day giving a dollar to homeless people he encounters. “It’s usually a couple of dollars a day,” he says.
Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official now with the Obama-aligned Center for American Progress, says he started when a priest friend told him, “People say you shouldn’t give it to him because they’ll get a drink. And he says, ‘Give it to ’em. Let them have a drink. They don’t have anything else.'”
Korb keeps singles in his wallet just for street people and says one homeless man stakes out his downtown office for a daily contribution.
Paul Bedard, The Examiner’s Washington Secrets columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears each weekday in the Politics section and on washingtonexaminer.com.
