While progressives across the nation led chants of “hope and change” following the 2008 election, it seems liberals have changed their tune, instead crying foul that President Barack Obama has failed them as he begins his second term.
Speaking on a panel at the annual liberal conference Netroots, Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, vice president for strategic partnerships at Advocates for Youth, addressed how to motivate Millennials during off-election years. And the activist noted that pushing young people to the polls isn’t as difficult as it seems.
“Young people have a very different perspective on electoral politics,” Thorne-Thomsen said.
In 2008, she said, young people — and particularly young people of color — engaged heavily in grassroots organizing in an effort to get out the vote for President Obama. But, she said, times have changed.
“We’re now talking about young people who voted for a president who didn’t deliver for them on a lot of the questions they’re concerned about,” she said. “We’re in a second term and we still don’t have immigration reform, we have nothing on climate control, we still haven’t moved LGBT equality as far as we would like. Never mind where we are with Roe, etc.
“And so they’re taking a very critical analysis of a president and of a government that has not delivered to them — while they continue to go to school, incur debt and are not be able to get jobs.”
Thorne-Thomsen’s critical analysis of Obama bears in stark contrast to what many voted and pushed for in 2008 as sentiments of hope and changed rang at campaign rallies across the nation.
While campaigning for his first term in 2007, the president promised to provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, support the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act — still under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court, eliminate all oil and gas tax loopholes, and sign the Freedom of Choice Act, a law that affirms abortion rights.
But according to the website politifact.com, all four of those promises have been broken, and of all the promises the president made on the campaign trail, he’s kept only 24 percent.
And for the activist, who spoke on a panel titled ‘Not Your Mother’s Abortion Fight: Millennials, Youth of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice,’ young people face a different government than she did as a youth growing up under President Ronald Reagan.
“That is different than a Generation X-er who lived under Reagan,” she said, contrasting the two presidents. “I didn’t like Reagan but there was a functionality in government at that time and that is actually not happening now.”
