-
Barack Obama - Source: Reuters -
Related
Everyone has their summer of political first love, the time when ideals taste like sweet nectar, and the world seems to be in delightful harmony with notions that will later come to be viewed as ill-formed and as giddy as the belief that high-waisted jeans are a fashion item.
For a generation of young Americans, that dappled season was 2008, when the Obamanator was grinding up Republicans in the jaws of an economic meltdown that both Republicans and Democrats had manufactured. At the end of 2008, Obama's approval rating amongst the under 30s was 73%. This was obvious when I visited Chicago just before the election and saw that he had brigades of festering youths sample a new activity they had hitherto disliked - getting up early and manning phone banks in urban areas to talk to people in the Mid-West about how they should vote.
I had a similar season myself, I'm embarrassed to recount; it was during the rise of the Alliance. Jim Anderton seemed to be brighter than his colleagues (this should have given me pause immediately; the politician who seems dumber than the rest is the one to watch, for he or she truly understands retail); the critiques he made of Rogernomics appealed to my sense that the country during the '80s had been hijacked by a well-organised cadre of doctrinaire but limited thinkers. I never manned a phone bank, as we didn't have them then, but I did enjoy a number of rousing arguments with my elders.
I also enjoyed basking in the approval of pro-Alliance peers. Many forget that part of the pleasure of politics is having like-minded people agree with us at length, and praise our excellent judgment.
It's hard to divine when America's young began abandoning Obama. Maybe it was when he failed to close Guantanamo. Maybe it was when he increased and wound down the war in Afghanistan in one fell swoop. May it was when they left college for the worst job market in several generations.
Some people go off political parties by being disappointed in government. It's a mark of my shallowness that I went off the Alliance by attending one of their victory parties. The "do" was held at the Trades Hall on Great North Road to celebrate the blood nose Sandra Lee gave Richard Prebble in Auckland Central in the 1993 election.
Oh boy, what a drag. No music, as I recall, and no streamers. I was in sympathy with the party's general platform, but meeting others who shared those ideals was - to say the least - disappointing. They seemed to be holding their views for personal gain (what wisdom, why not vote out of self interest?). They were dismal conversationalists. They didn't have anything drinkable to share with me.
Experience is a teacher that is almost as cruel as one's own naivety, which brings us back to what was once called the Obama generation. The scientific measure says that the 73% approval rating is down to 57, as per a Pew Institute poll of three months ago. Sure, it's not the end of the world, but a more worrying and unscientific measure is that I don't see a single Obama t-shirt in New York any more. This isn't just a sign of a lower profile. The president's profile is undiminished for all kinds of reasons, some of them good.
Let's make a comparison. I still see Flight of the Conchords t-shirts, and their show isn't even on at present.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
World News Video
-
Dangerous rush to Everest summit (1:59)
-
Dozens killed in Syrian massacre (2:09)
-
'King of Romance' competes in Eurovision (1:46)
