June 3, 2010, 10:12 pm

Save Us, Millennials

By TIMOTHY EGAN

When an electorate is red-faced and fist-clenched, when the collective national blood pressure is 160 over 100, when the big issues of the day are mired in tired minds, it’s time to turn to the great, renewable resource of any vibrant democracy: the kids.

The millennials, that echo boomer generation born after 1982, have not been heard from of late, ever since proving that they could pull away from their Facebook pages long enough to help elect a president.

The young were Barack Obama’s strongest supporters, and still are, though there’s been some slippage. They were wise beyond their years and ahead of every other generation on the major issues — from offshore oil drilling (not so fast), to gays in the military (duh), to tolerance of the new American ethnic stew (you mean that’s still a problem?).

But having done their part for history, and now facing a job market that is forcing many of them to become reacquainted with their childhood bedrooms, the generation born to all those baby boomers has become somewhat invisible.

We’ve been led to believe that the grumpy, the cranky and the bitter will drive the midterm elections in the fall. You would never know, with nightly images of jowly Tea Partiers and their inchoate discontents, that people ages 18 to 29 years old made up a larger percentage of the 2008 electorate than those over 65.

Because they gave their hearts to Obama, by an overwhelming margin, the young have a proprietary interest in this president. And now, at Obama’s moment of peril, when people who are losing their heads want him to lose his, we need the cooler minds of a generation that grew up with endless wars and color-coded terrorist alerts.

If anyone should be complaining about deficits, it should be the 20-somethings who will have to pay for all those meds-popping boomers moving into the comfort of Medicare and Social Security.

If anyone should be upset over two long wars that were put on the credit card, it should be the generation shedding the most blood in those conflicts.

And if anyone should take personally the poisoning of a vast ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico, it should the one cohort of the electorate that showed the most skepticism of oil companies and the strongest desire for a new green economy.

Instead, at a time when most Americans described themselves as “angry,” the generation now entering adulthood is keeping their trademark optimism. A recent, detailed survey of their attitudes done by the Pew Research Center was headlined: “The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.”

Those are precisely the character traits needed for this age, and all the more reason why Obama should engage these voters for the upcoming election.

For starters, consider what it would be like to have Mitch McConnell, the dyspeptic Republican from Kentucky who emerges from his turtle shell every two weeks to say no, as the next Senate majority leader. Or John Boehner, who called expansion of health care for 32 million Americans “Armageddon”— running the House.

Let Boehner take away from millions of fresh-minted adults the provision in the new law that allows dependent children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26.

Or look at the exhausted fight over gays in the military. More than any other generation, millennials see this as a nonissue. But a week ago Senator John McCain threatened a filibuster to keep gay men and lesbians from being able to openly serve their country in uniform. He is a man of his age.

Can we just press the fast-forward button a decade or so into the future, or have McCain debate his eminently more sensible daughter, Meghan?

Nor are the millennials afraid of immigration — in part because it’s a family issue. Nearly one in four Americans under the age of 18 have at least one immigrant parent, according to a recent national portrait put out by the Brookings Institution.

“This is the most diverse generation in history,” said Heather Smith, the president of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan youth political advocacy group. “They’re also optimistic, and don’t participate in the all the fear-mongering.”

Obama could rouse this generation to help save the oil-choked gulf, much the way Franklin Roosevelt did with his youthful Civilian Conservation Corps. While still holding BP accountable, the president could set up a millennial corps of workers, calling on their sense of service, their desire for change, their youthful belief in restoration.

Besides, with news that George W. Bush is now on Facebook, what better time to leave the digital den?

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/save-us-millennials/