Naivety. It's a theme usually slipped between the lines by surrogates for Hillary Clinton, trying to explain why millennial voters so strongly back Senator Bernie Sanders over the former Secretary of State. At least one of her high profile supporters though, Democratic Rep. George Butterfield, chose to go there boldly. Rep. Butterfield is a Hillary Clinton ally from North Carolina who is also the Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Speaking at an event announcing an endorsement for Clinton by the CBC PAC, Butterfield, as reported by The Hill, made these comments:
“I hope the students would understand the big picture, and that is, Sen. Sanders’s message might be appealing, but is it realistic?” Butterfield said Wednesday.
Butterfield attributed Sanders’s success with millennials to the “inexperience” of those young voters.
“Many of these are first-time voters, and Sen. Sanders’s message resonates with a younger generation because of the promises that he’s making,” Butterfield said. “It’s not a disparagement on the new voters. It’s the fact that many of them are inexperienced and have not gone through an election cycle before.
“You listen to the message, and then you make a second evaluation about whether it’s realistic.” http://thehill.com/homenews/house/26...o-clintons-aid
Embedded inside that “friendly” critique regarding the “inexperience” of youthful voters was another even sharper one contained in this phrase; “Sen. Sanders’s message resonates with a younger generation because of the promises that he’s making.” That's code talk for all of that so called “free stuff”. The Hillary Clinton campaign has to be artful in the way they make the charge that young folk really only support Sanders because he is offering them the promise of “free stuff” because a) directly saying that would exacerbate their current problem with millennial voters and b) they are counting on the support of millennial voters in the General Election race against the Republicans if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination. But someone like Rand Paul, when he was still in the Republican race, was freer to spell it out clearly, in comments like this one made at a Heritage Action for America presidential forum:
“Alright, Bernie Sanders is offering you free stuff. He wants to give you free healthcare. He’d give you a free car. He’d give you a free house. But guess what. There is no free lunch.” Rand left out Bernie's position on tuition free public higher education and threw in a colorful hallucination concerning free cars and houses instead, but you get the idea. Free stuff is unrealistic, got that? Even if the lure of lots of free stuff is downright exciting. And that of course leads right into another classic excuse made by the Clinton campaign to explain why Hillary is getting trounced by millennial voters. Campaigning for his wife in Florida, Bill Clinton recently said the following:
“...both primaries have been dominated by very emotional campaigns that I think are the product of people’s doubt about whether they can claim that future.” He also said this; “We are too politically polarized and we keep rewarding people who tell us things they know they can’t do because it pushes our hot button.” In regard to the Democratic primaries Bill Clinton was addressing the hot button of unrealistic free stuff no doubt, which makes young folk get so highly emotional.
So in summary then, millennial are responding with their hearts, not their heads, when they flock to Bernie Sanders (you've heard that line before too, haven't you?) Because of their inexperience and youthful emotions, they truly believe that getting all of that exciting free stuff is actually possible, despite all evidence to the contrary. Just because most of them graduated from public high schools after twelve years of public education, without incurring any personal debt in the process, or that most other advanced nations offer 16 years of tuition free public education to their citizens, is no good reason to believe that America is capable of pulling something like that off here. And our unique American system of health care would no longer be so exceptionally American if we started guarantee free health care to all of our citizens the way that other advanced democracies do.
Bill and Hillary Clinton both know personally how unrealistic the expectations of youth tend to be before they mature and learn to be pragmatic about what is really feasible. A millennial, as defied by Merriam Webster, is “a person born in the 1980s or 1990s —usually plural. ” Using that definition everyone with an age between 17 and 36 today is now a millennial. When Bill Clinton was himself a mere 30 years old he became the Attorney General of Arkansas. When Hillary Clinton was herself a mere 26 years old she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.
When Martin Luther King Jr was 26 he led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. By the time he was 28 he had helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, serving as its first president. When John Lewis was 23 he was the Chairman of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bobby Kennedy would be considered the equivalent to an older millennial today at 36, when he became the Attorney General of the United States and the closest Advisory to his brother the American President. Bill Gates was 20 when he co-founded Microsoft, and Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple.
One could argue that passion got the best of all of the people mentioned above, before they could internalize what was deemed possible to achieve by the establishment of their youth. You could say the same about much of a whole generation that engaged in the struggle to end Segregation in America, to end the war in Vietnam, to move feminist concerns into the foreground of public debate, to instill environmental consciousness into a disposable society and more. Young people by and large, all too naive to understand what couldn't be accomplished. All too impatient to change the world to accept that it couldn't be done, except incrementally, through a realistic pragmatic approach. Young people like the ones in this song, which pretty much everyone has heard by now:
“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'. “
Bob Dylan wrote that, he was 23 at he time.