Why Young People Are Turning on Obama

As
I write at The Daily Beast, between
2008 and 2012, Barack Obama pulled 2.4 million fewer votes from
voters between the ages of 18 and 29. New polls shows that 54
percent of that group disapprove of the job he’s doing as
president. Wha happened?

The abysmal
and pathetic launch of healthcare.gov is simply the cherry
on top of a shit sundae Obama’s been whipping up for the kids. You
can protest that the stimulus should have been bigger, but when you
judge its success against what the Obama administration claimed it
would do, it was an
epic fail. While masquerading as the peace and freedom
candidate – easy to do against such hawkish characters as Hillary
Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in the general election –
Obama prided himself on tripling troop strength in Afghanistan and
tried to extend our stays there and in Iraq. But for
the vocal pushback from Rand Paul, Justin Amash, and a
bunch of younger, non-interventionist Republicans, there’s every
reason that the U.S. would have started an unsanctioned war in
Syria, just as it did in Libya (where things are working out…how,
again?)….

The president has been genuinely awful on pot legalization and
dragged his feet on gay marriage – issues on which younger voters
are in front of the general population – and he spent his first
term deporting more immigrants than George W. Bush managed to in
eight years (despite minor reprieves announced in time for the 2012
elections, the
deportations keep on happening). The revelations of
widespread, Obama-approved drone strikes, the compilation of a
presidential kill list, and the data collection of phone logs and
internet traffic don’t exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feelings from
a generation that lives online. His response to the Gulf oil
spill was
dithering to non-existent and his alt-energy plans have
come to naught even as fracking has put the country on a
path to
something like energy independence. And clandestine
attempts to expand onerous copyright laws and outlaw
cellphone unlocking via the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty aren’t
helping either.

Read the whole thing.