Remember when Barack Obama used to be the coolest guy in the country? Four years ago he portrayed himself as the embodiment of everything that we wanted to see change in the world. A break with the old system of politics. His opponent, John McCain was the living, barely breathing embodiment of what American politics had become. Crippled, overwhelmed and confused. Young people as a group fell for Obama hard. Not only turning out to vote for him in epic proportions but investing their time and money in support of his cause. He promised to become a representative of our generation against the rigid regime of our parents. He was going to give the younger generation a voice; a way to right the course of the country we all saw was going down the wrong road.
That was four years ago…
Obama might still be hanging around with Jay-Z or Will.I.am, but his failure to advance the causes of the younger generation was clearly illustrated by several of his and Joe Biden’s answers at the debates. In the second debate when a twenty year old college student asked about his prospect of finding a job after graduation, Obama could have used that chance to speak directly to our generation, instead he decided to make a point about the Auto Bailout and manufacturing jobs. I don’t want to assume too much about other people’s lives, but I think it is a safe bet that not many twenty-year-old college students from Long Island aspire to be autoworkers. Given the chance to connect with younger voters, Obama chose to score points with our parents.
The point of the matter is that the world is changing… rapidly. There used to be a time when we designed and built our innovations in this country. Now we design them and let others build them. As other countries such as India and China advance, it is natural that our economies will become more intertwined. In those counties, where everyone is just trying to escape crushing poverty, it is to be expected that they would count themselves blessed to have a job on an assembly line. That’s not this country anymore. We have advanced from makers to creators, and it is with our minds not our hands that we will build our future. This is good for the country and the world as a whole. If we can design better products and have them built cheaper, we all benefit.
This is the era of Apple, Google, Pixar and Facebook. Our innovation as a nation is moving in a new direction, clinging to the innovations of a hundred years and saying it will solve our problems today is backwards thinking.
Obama and his people are holding on to the middle class of yesterday, it is the group that supported them over the last century and he is counting on them to continuing doing the same. Our generation is going down a new path, while Obama holds steady on the old.
Joe Biden had his special moment during the debate when he looked the nation in the eye through the camera and asked who they trusted the most on Medicare/Medicaid. He wasn’t addressing the nation; he was speaking to a very select group- those who are on those programs or soon will be. Paul Ryan charges that those programs are on the path to bankruptcy, that they must be reformed before they fail and cost the younger generations the protections they are providing to the older generations. Obama and Biden don’t want to hear about it. When confronted by Ryan, Biden fell back on appealing to the elderly.
The young voters of the country understand that these programs in their current state will not exist when we need them. The older generations have sucked them dry and are turning a deaf ear to our pleas of reform. Obama and Biden may speak like they are young, but they are siding with the elderly over us. We want to be in control of our future, we see that the government is not trustworthy enough for us to trust them with such a great responsibility. Reform is a must, we cannot continue on the path we are on. Who is really speaking out about solving these problems before they crush us?
We have witnessed an era of big government, and it is failing. We are looking for more responsibility for our own lives and more freedom to achieve our dreams. We must recognize who offers us the chance to succeed on our own and who wants to tie us to the failures of the last fifty years.
The government has stepped into the Healthcare and education crises we face, it has succeeded in driving up costs and lowering expectations. Obama’s solution is to pour more money into these sinkholes and hope it works out. That has been tried… it has failed.
In order to solve the problems facing us, we need innovation and reform. Outside the box thinking is what will solve these problems for us, the prior generations designed these programs and sustained them just long enough to benefit themselves. As we look forward to the future we must realize it will be us that will be saddled with debt and legacy of so much linear thinking. Obama promised to be that man four years ago, new ideas, new solutions and the guts to try them. Now we see him as the same as the rest of the political class. Bitterly attempting to cling to power by playing groups off each other and sacrificing the future to secure the votes of the present.
The dream of a fiscally responsible, socially progressive party is not reality yet. However the formula that gets the closest to that is Romney and Ryan’s plan of a responsible Federal Government and pushing more decisions back to the states, giving us more control over the laws that effect our daily lives.
When we go vote on Tuesday we must think of our future, a future of supporting industries that are failing, paying taxes and borrowing to support generations that had better opportunities than we do. Our future can be bright and free or it can be a continuation of the path of a bloated government sucking us all down with it.
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