The Millennials

The largest age group in America has been dubbed The Millennials because it is the first wave to come of age in the 21st Century. They were born between the dawn of the Reagan Era and the sunset of the Clinton presidency; they are now between 31 and 45 years of age. There are 80 million of them. Millennials outnumber Boomers by 17 million; they outnumber GenXers by 27 million. One more thing: They vote.

The Millennials showered John Kerry with votes in 2004; their vote broke 2 to 1 for Barack Obama in '08. So it's high time the Republican Party engaged this voting cohort. History has demonstrated that party identification turns to concrete after three presidential elections, so the Republicans had better get moving if they hope to prevent this enormous group of voters from becoming life-long Democrats or free-floating independents. To gain any traction with Millennials, the Republican publicity machine needs to get a few things straight.

First of all, Millennials are puzzled by ideology. They have lived in prosperous times; they have lived without conflict. If national surveys are to be believed, our public-school-educated Millennials have scant understanding of our nation's true history or how our economic system really functions. In short, they have no coherent vision of either politics or economics – they just feel stuff. They were suckers for the smooth-talking Barack Obama.

Candidate Obama, with no previous executive experience and less than a year in the U.S. Senate, was the picture-perfect faculty-lounge ideologist; once elected he took America on a lurching excursion to the Left. Obama had promised that lobbyists would have no say in his administration, but ObamaCare was crafted by no fewer than eleven hundred special-interest lobbyists. Obama promised that all proposed legislation would be posted on the Internet days before it came for a vote, but that never happened. Obama signed off on ObamaCare without even reading it; Nancy Pelosi notoriously announced that legislators would have to make ObamaCare the law of the land before they could discover what was in it. Obama promised that his administration would be the most transparent administration in history but, in fact, has blocked more Freedom of Information Act inquiries than any previous administration. Obama's propensity for sharp-tongued demagoguery in lieu of fresh ideas has hardened partisan divisions, fostered governmental gridlock and made a laughingstock of his petulant chiding that Republicans should “set childish things aside.”

After two years of watching Obama alternate between blaming George W. Bush and slavishly emulating him, the Millennials have measurably cooled to the Obama style. Obama's job-approval ratings among Millennials are down; fewer Millennials voted in the 2010 midterm elections than voted in the '06 midterms.

The winning move for Republicans right now is to be upbeat and pragmatic, to articulate sensible solutions to the problems confronting the Millennials, including job creation and the crushing burden of paying for other people's “entitlements.”

Millennials, more than any other cohort, have been wounded by the Great Obama Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics fully 37% of Millennials are now unemployed or underemployed. These are people who should be in, or approaching, their peak earning years. Obama's policies have suffocated job creation and perpetrated generational theft on the Millennials and their children. All of the trillions of dollars Barack Obama has borrowed from China and squandered to no effect will have to be repaid, with interest, by the Millennials and their children in the forms of impoverishing taxation and a moribund economy.

The moment is at hand for conservatives to present a restrained and coherent program for mitigating the suffering wrought by the spendthrift “progressives” of both political parties. Mr. Obama's geysers of borrowed cash have accomplished nothing but to increase our future dependence on communist China. What the Millennials need now is an education in economics of the sort that Ronald Reagan and his economic adviser Arthur Laffer taught America back when the Millennials were youngsters. That lesson doubled revenues to the U.S. Treasury.

This is what our erstwhile president calls a “teachable moment.” So let the teaching begin. It was lavish liberalism that set us up for this economic crash; it will be conservative restraint that saves our nation once again, simply because conservatism is the triumph of experience over wishful thinking.