ROLL CALL: More Ready for Kwan Than Clinton.
Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, but she still has a gaping weakness with the young voters that helped delivered the White House to President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. If your presidential campaign had just lost the youth vote by 70 percent to a wild-haired, 74-year-old socialist in two states, you would deploy Michelle Kwan to do something about it too.
Kwan is an accomplished (five-time World Figure Skating Champion), brilliant (Stanford grad), politically astute (she worked as an envoy in the Obama State Department and married the grandson of a senator) daughter of immigrants (the New American Majority!). More important than any of that, she is beloved by young women who once adorned their bedroom walls with posters of Kwan and are now old enough to vote for Hillary Clinton.
But at one of four college events that Kwan headlined for Clinton last week in South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s primary, even Kwan couldn’t get the 30-or-so people who came Ready for Hillary.
And it’s not because she didn’t try.
It’s a tough sell. Hillary is boring, old, and kind of mean. Also extraordinarily corrupt.
Related: Bernie Sanders & Hillary Clinton Are Running For President of Geritol Nation.
It’s worth puzzling over the inability of liberals and Democrats in particular to figure out a forward-looking set of policies. It should be a source of shame that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are explicitly anti-Uber and other elements of the sharing economy (being hypocritical about it makes it even worse). Conservatives at least have the excuse of wanting to maintain the status quo or, better yet, return to the status quo of five or 10 or 15 years ago. That’s their whole point as an ideological group and it explains their consistent resistance to virtually all forms of social change that give more power to individuals.
Liberals are at least supposed to be less hung up on the past and captivated by efficiency that makes life better for all of us, especially the poor. And yet, as Vanneman points out, their politics seem much more focused on keeping things exactly as they are for a middle- to upper-middle class group.
Earlier this year, Gallup reported that party identification for Democrats is a 27-year low, at just 29 percent (as awful as that is, it’s still better than the GOP’s 26 percent). When you look at the two presidential candidates on the Democratic side, it’s easy to understand why folks are vacating the brand. Sanders and Clinton are not simply chronologically old but, more important, ideologically ancient, proper representatives only for a Geritol Nation that has nothing but tired blood to offer.
Tired blood indeed.