Boom and Bust - Mrs. Clinton tries to appeal to young voters.

[Ubiquitous]

“Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton and her policies, it’s clear
that the cool kids are with her,” CNN’s Sally Kohn claimed in an op-ed
last week.

We know, we know, fish in a barrel. Sorry about that, fish.

What Kohn means is that various celebrities popular among the young-
adult demographic (curiously, all the examples she cites are female)
support Mrs. Clinton and various left-liberal causes, and their fans
can be expected to fall in line:

[Katy] Perry isn’t the only political tastemaker. Just as
Beyoncé can bless kale with coolness, so, too, can she do the
same for Black Lives Matter. When Amy Schumer stands up for
common sense gun control and Lena Dunham speaks up for abortion
rights, they’re not just mobilizing their followings but
deploying their cultural currencies. In other words, these
celebrities are showing not just what cool kids wear and listen
to, but what cool kids can and should believe in.

So why are the kids so cool to Mrs. Clinton? “Polls suggest that most
millennials prefer Clinton to [Donald] Trump, but especially among
college-aged voters who tend to lean left, her margin isn’t nearly as
wide as President Obama’s over Mitt Romney,” Politico reports from
Philadelphia, where Mrs. Clinton gave a speech at Temple University
aimed at solving that problem.

“The carefully curated crowd was clearly on her side,” observes
reporter Michael Grunwald. Even so, “the enthusiasm was not exactly
overwhelming”:

In interviews at the event, many of her millennial supporters,
especially the former [Bernie] Sanders revolutionaries, talked
about her in the could-be-worse tone they might use to describe
a boring but socially appropriate romantic partner. They used
words like “capable,” “well-informed,” “responsible,” and
“qualified.” They dutifully praised her positions on issues
like abortion, student debt, mass incarceration, and climate
change, while emphasizing the importance of stopping Trump and
his inflammatory rhetoric. But most of them did not sound
particularly inspired.

The speech itself was defensive, as the Hill recounts:

“I also know that even if you are totally opposed to Donald
Trump, you still may have some questions about me. I get
that,” she said during a rally at Temple University in
Philadelphia.

“And I want to do my best to answer those questions. When it comes to
public service, the service part has always been easier for me than the
public part. . . . No one will work harder to make your life better.”

Are you excited yet? We didn’t think so. Mrs. Clinton’s youth-outreach
effort this week also includes a bylined piece at Mic.com
condescendingly titled “Here’s What Millennials Have Taught Me.” We
won’t quote it because we don’t want to put you to sleep, but the gist
is that millennials have taught her that milliennials are totally
awesome.

In 1992, long before the first millennial reached voting age, 46-year-
old Bill Clinton was cool. So was 47-year-old Barack Obama in 2008.
Sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Clinton is not. But you don’t have to be
young (or youngish) to be cool. In this year’s primaries young
Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the superannuated yet childlike
Bernie Sanders, who is too old even to be a baby boomer. (Ironically,
he is a member of the “silent generation.”) Early this year that
prompted something never before seen, a flash of wit from the New York
Times’s Charles Blow: “Sanders has become the cool uncle and Clinton
has become the frigid aunt.”

To be sure, the septuagenarian Trump, while charismatic, isn’t cool
either. “Everything about the man screams 1963,” observed John
Podhoretz in the New York Post in May. “He’s from the Rat Pack 1960s,”
the era of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. “Even the
insult comedy he brought into American political discourse seems to
date back to a Rat Pack show at the Sands—to Joey Bishop or Don
Rickles.” (A few days after Podhoretz wrote that, the Washington Post
reported that Rickles, 90, is still performing. Asked about the Trump
comparison, “the comedian shrugs and shakes his left hand, as if to
say, ‘Are you kidding?’ ”)

“You want something to vote for, not just against,” Mrs. Clinton told
the carefully curated collegians on Monday. “Optimism, not resentment;
answers, not anger; ideas, not insults; bridges, not walls,” she said.

Wow, “answers, not anger.” With the possible exception of a polar bear
eating a Popsicle in a walk-in freezer in the Yukon, could anything
ever be cooler?

The Atlantic previewed the Philadelphia speech with a Ronald Brownstein
piece titled “Millennial Voters May Cost Hillary Clinton the Election”:

Virtually all national and state surveys show Clinton leading
Trump among Millennial voters. But the same polls show her
falling well short of Obama’s showing among them, according to
exit polls, in 2008 (67 percent) or 2012 (60 percent). Even
more important, they show her failing to consolidate the
enormous share of Millennials who express unfavorable views
about Trump. Instead, many of those voters now say they will
support libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party nominee Jill
Stein. . . .

Consider the recent George Washington University Battleground
Poll conducted by Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, and Celinda
Lake, a Democrat. In that survey, 73 percent of Millennials
said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, 68 percent said
they trusted Clinton more than him to defend the middle class,
64 percent trusted her more to handle foreign policy, and 61
percent favored her over Trump to manage the economy. Yet in a
four-way ballot test, she drew just 46 percent support,
compared to 26 percent for Trump, 18 percent for Johnson, and 5
percent for Stein.

It gets worse. At FiveThirtyEight.com, Farai Chideya reports that Mrs.
Clinton is even having trouble with _black_ millennials, who stand at
the intersection of two overwhelmingly pro-Obama demographics:

An ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week found that
among black Americans of all ages, Clinton is leading Trump 93
percent to 3. But an August survey of young voters by
GenForward found that 60 percent of black Americans aged 18 to
30 supported Clinton—or about 30 percentage points less than
African-Americans at large. Fourteen percent of black
millennials said they would not vote, 5 percent said they would
vote for the Green or Libertarian candidates, and 2 percent
planned to vote for Trump.

A chart accompanying Chideya’s piece shows that by the same measure,
Mrs. Clinton has less support among Latino and even white milliennials
than among such voters of all ages.

To be sure, that’s something of an apples-to-oranges comparison. The
Post/ABC poll applied a likely-voter screen, whereas the GenForward one
(which excluded everyone over 30) included even those who said they
probably won’t vote. On the other hand, turnout tends to be directly
correlated with age, and it seems unlikely the uncool Mrs. Clinton will
have anywhere near Obama’s success in motivating young adults to vote.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As Michael Barone observes:

Strategies and tactics that seem certain to produce victory
can eventually produce defeat. Prognostications that one party
or platform will prevail far into the future usually turn out
to have a surprisingly early sell-by date. . . .

[Obama’s] majority depended on high turnout and high Democratic
percentages from three groups: blacks, Hispanics, and young
people. The last two of these demographic groups will
inevitably grow as percentages of the population, and many
observers have speculated that this will result in an emerging
and enduring Democratic-party majority.

Actually, that’s not quite right. Young people inevitably tend to grow
old. Already we’ve heard unconfirmed reports of millennials reaching
their mid-30s. The cool kids won’t be kids forever. Just ask the
Clintons.


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Hillary is not on the campaign trail today because of debate
preparation, which is mainly shopping for cough drops.