Young voters souring on Obama

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Updated: November 20, 2011 2:19AM

President Barack Obama misjudged the severity of our economic malaise, promoted feckless policies leaving 14 million Americans unemployed, shunted job creation to the side while he chased the great liberal dream of universal health care, and presided over the first downgrading of America’s credit in the nation’s history. Yet, the prevailing sentiment is that he will be re-elected next year.

Fifty-four percent of Americans think he has a good chance at winning another term, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll. I hear that all the time. Just the other day, my dentist, an Obama supporter, crowed, “Who do the Republicans have who’s going to beat Obama?”

Even some conservatives share this view. Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece listing the ABCs of the Obama presidency, an almost unbroken chronicle of failure until Stephens hit Z, which stood for a zero likelihood of any of the current Republican candidates beating Obama.

Yet, it’s worth remembering that in the best Democratic presidential year in a generation, 47 percent of the vote went against Obama. And however dissatisfied Republicans are with the field, they will unite behind the eventual nominee.

Primary contests tend to drive candidates toward ideologically purer positions. That’s true for both parties, but in today’s environment — especially since Obama won’t face a primary challenge — this is an issue with more downside for Republicans. The nominating calendar is front-loaded with an emphasis on social conservatives thanks to contests in Iowa — the symbolically important Ames Straw Poll is Saturday — and South Carolina.

Whoever emerges as the nominee will have to attract independent voters to prevail in the general election. The nominee would be well advised to read a new book, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, by Margaret Hoover, a former White House staffer.

As the title implies, she focuses on the young vote, especially that of the 80-million-strong millennial generation, voters who came of age in the new millennium. They went 2-to-1 for Obama in 2008, a generational gap the GOP must overcome. Hoover, in Chicago last week promoting her book, says the pathway to doing that means the party must “emphasize economic values and de-emphasize social issues.”

Her thinking was inspired by her unhappiness with the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign trying to churn up social conservatives by opposing same-sex marriage. Her vital insight is that the party should view this issue through the traditional conservative value of freedom: Government efforts to prohibit same-sex marriage are “inconsistent with a conservatism that champions individual liberty.”

Republicans should appeal to the millennials’ yearning for economic growth and opportunity. They are a moderate, fiscally principled, pragmatic and solutions-oriented group. The generation has been hard-hit by Obamanomics, with 37 percent of them unemployed or under-employed, she notes. Their 55 percent support for Obama is down 18 percentage points from 2009.

Millennials see themselves as individuals and reject liberalism’s identity politics. Millennial women, for instance, “understand that, in a fluid society, special-interest groups end up disempowering people by confining them to group definitions, and thereby undermining their individuality,” says Hoover.

Fluent in Spanish, Hoover says millennials are the most diverse generation and that the GOP must back comprehensive pro- immigration reform with “adequate benchmarks on border control.” She notes the newest rising stars in Hispanic politics are Republicans — Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Govs. Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Brian Sandoval of Nevada.

The 2012 Republican nominee would do well to take a page from Hoover’s book — a lot of pages.