Barack Obama

When Washington returns in 2010 we will have a new issue to challenge the effective management of an already incredibly crowded agenda - a review of our intelligence, homeland security and counter-terrorism strategies and performance in the aftermath of the Nigerian-who-got-through. 

The coming debate could radically impact Washington's agenda in 2010. Given that these issues touch on a wide range of Congressional committees and areas of the Administration, and that there is a wide-held belief in DC that the reforms made during the Bush era were not completely effective or well done, it is going to be hard to control and contain the debate once it begins.   That there are so many different Congressional committees involved in this debate is itself a sign of the lack of coherence of the new counter-terrorism regime ushered in during the Bush era, from the DNI to DHS itself. 

The truth is that it may be time for the country to have a more systematic, thoughtful discussion about how to best deal with the global threat of terrorism, the nature of terrorism itself and how the two wars we are already fighting fit into our overall global national security strategy.  Over the last few days you could feel the American people saying - Nigeria? Yemen? Is there no end to this? How does all this relate to what is happening in Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan? It has been almost a decade now, with trillions spent, ten of thousands of American causalties, vast new bureaucracies built, a new significant escalation in Afghanistan, extraordinary opportunity costs - and what have we accomplished? Are we safer? What can we do better?  These are reasonable questions for the American people to ask.

If this debate lasts for months - which it could - it may very well knock other important priorities off the legislative calendar this year, a calendar that was already in danger of being incredibly overloaded.  Could we end up spending the coming year finishing health care, and having long and significant debates our economic and security policies, pushing a whole array of other important - but less important issues - off the agenda?

Does all this seem like an overreaction to a lone man who got through Fortress America? Perhaps, but that the vast new intelligence appartus built over the past decade didn't put some now clearly reasonable pieces together to stop a threat, and the attack demonstrated how the global jihadi network has spread beyond the places we are already significantly engaged abroad, has raised some critical issues which now seem inevitably headed towards a big, sustained and perhaps overdue conversation. 

Rather than fighting the consolidation of the 2010 agenda it may be in the interest of the governing party to embrace it, and not look defensive, as if they have other things they would rather be talking about.   Peace and prosperity drive most elections in the US, and 2010 may end up being no different.  The Republicans are already jumping on the Christmas Day attempt, and will no doubt spend the year ahead trying to reorient the national discussion to an area - national security - they feel will advantageous for them.  But given their actual record in the decade just past, and the extraordinary mess they left for others to clean up, the Republicans may rue the day the debate became about national security, for there is no way to have this debate without talking about the epic foreign policy and security failures of the Bush era, something they simply cannot disown.

So rather than wishing this new issue environment away, the President and the Democrats might decide rather to make it their own, and spend their political year making their case for how they hope to bring peace and prosperity to a country desperately seeking it.   They can take on the anarchronistic and disproven arguments of the conservatives head on, defining their vision and plans, and making very clear, where, on the two most important issues facing the nation, it is exactly they want to take us.  Not at all an unreasonable thing for the American people to ask of the governing party in a time of great transition and national challenge.

Happy New Year all. 

And a new year it will be.

Mon PM Update: On his Mother Jones blog David Corn chews over this essay a bit, and provides some thoughts of his own.

While the nation has been right to focus on the most recent outbreak of incivility, if not downright hostility, directed toward President Obama generally and his health care proposal specifically, the diagnosis of what ails the country and what must be done to end this type of behavior has been way off target.

Republicans, who were quick to compare the actions of their party's fringe elements to harsh, sometimes over the top Democratic criticism of   former President George W. Bush missed the qualitative difference between expressing strong policy disagreement with the opposition, which is fair game in any political season, and taking guns to Presidential appearances.  Ironically, Republicans are guilty of the same "moral equivalency" judgment error that they accused Democrats who minimized Communist war crimes in Vietnam and the actions of urban rioters of in the 1960s of committing.     Speaker Nancy Pelosi was closer to the truth when she likened today's vitriolic rhetoric to the hate speech directed toward gays in San Francisco in the 1970s, but she failed to pursue the historical analogy far enough.

This kind of anger, born out of a sense of fear of a rapidly changing world, and directed at those that seem to be causing the world to move both too fast and in the wrong direction, has erupted regularly whenever America has gone through the type of generational change it's now experiencing.

As generational theorists, William Strauss and Neil Howe pointed out, an idealist generation animated by moral beliefs, such as today's Baby Boomers, have, in their youth, regularly shaken American society by confronting the cultural values of older generations. Such generations have always been followed by an alienated, individualistic generational archetype, which tends to be rude and disrespectful, especially toward its elders.  The most recent historical examples of this archetype are the Lost Generation who came of age in the 1920s and Generation X, born 1965-1981.  As members of these two types of generations mature and assume positions of leadership, society coarsens and rhetoric escalates from being merely confrontational to speech that is deliberately designed to provoke and incite. It's the difference between Boomer rock n' roll and Gen X rap--or between Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

But inevitably, this harsh cultural style engenders a backlash from an emerging civic-oriented generation.   The most recent civic generations are Millennials  (born 1982-2003) and, in the 1930s and 1940s, the GI Generation.    Historically, the type of generational alignment we see now is associated with the most traumatic and significant crises in American history: the American Revolution and adoption of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and World War II.  The way this generational confrontation has been resolved in American history should give pause to those who encourage incivility, either by their silence or their direct involvement.

Popular opinion was sharply divided during the Revolutionary War.  Between a fifth and a third of the population of the Thirteen Colonies supported the British. Estimates are that after the war, between sixty and one hundred thousand Loyalists fled the newly born United States.  Nor did the Constitution's ratification end our divisions. In spite of George Washington's warning against the "partisan spirit" and the intentional failure of the Constitution to mention them, nascent political parties- Republicans and Federalists -formed by the end of his administration to confront one another on the issue of the proper role and size of the federal government.

Roughly eighty years later, seemingly irreconcilable differences between generations and regions led to the Civil War. Once Lincoln assumed the presidency, he faced opposition from all sides. The words, if not the deed, of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, "Sic semper tyrannus" ("Thus always to tyrants") succinctly expressed the thoughts of most white Southerners about Lincoln. In the North, much of the criticism was intensely personal: Lincoln was called an "ape," a "baboon" or worse. Many opposed what they perceived to be a war sacrificing the blood of white men to free blacks. Riots protesting the military draft broke out in Northern cities. In New York blacks were lynched and the city's Negro orphanage burned. Even within his own Republican party, a faction called him timid for failing to emancipate the slaves sooner than he did or to pursue a more vindictive policy against the secessionist states.

When the generational archetypes were again aligned in a similar way in the early 1930s, the country was confronted by the greatest economic crisis in its history. While a hero to many, a month before his inauguration, Roosevelt was nearly the victim of an assassination. Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer with anarchist leanings, fired at FDR but hit Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago instead and killed him. Once in office, Roosevelt was personally criticized from the right for being a "traitor to his class." In shrill language that is once again being tossed cavalierly around Washington today, FDR's policies and programs were labeled "foreign," "socialist," "communist" and "fascist." His Social Security proposal was derided as a severe invasion of privacy. At the same time, from the other side of the political spectrum, Roosevelt was criticized for not doing enough to dismantle the capitalist system and, in the words of Huey Long, "Share the Wealth."

History demonstrates that the first years of a transition from an ideological era, such as the one Boomers and Xers dominated from 1968 to 2008, to an era dominated by civic generations, like the GI Generation and Millennials, are initially among the most rancorous, contentious, and sometimes violent, of any in American history.  But history also provides valuable lessons for how to deal with these tensions in order to increase civic unity.

The Founding Fathers worked hard to promote an "era of good feelings," admonishing citizens to maintain decorum in their public debates, even as they privately excoriated their opponents. Lincoln confronted his detractors directly, most famously with his principled stance that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."  And FDR condemned "economic royalists" intent on defending their privileged position to the detriment of the "forgotten man."

As the newest civic era begins, both Republican and Democrats must, in President Obama's phrase, "call out," those who engage in lies and demagoguery or threaten physical violence toward governmental institutions and leaders. Both sides need to brand such actions, not just wrong-headed, but a threat to the nation's ability to successfully sail through the troubled waters of our current generational alignment.  History suggests that a true sense of national solidarity will return when the nation successfully confronts the major challenges it will continue to face.   But in the interim the least that must be done is to denounce actions and behavior that will make future unity more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. 

After enduring the rancorous dog days of August, last week was a good one for President Obama. It began with his talk to America's young people. Faced with charges from paranoid conservatives and Republicans that he was attempting to indoctrinate school children with a radical and foreign message, the president simply asked kids to study hard, stay in school, get good grades, and be unwilling to accept failure. His words likely inspired many of the students to whom they were addressed while at the same time making his opponents appear silly, if not downright bizarre.

But the capstone of the president's week was his address to a joint session of Congress in which he detailed his plan to reform America's health care system. In his speech, President Obama described his plan's benefits, addressed the legitimate concerns of Americans about the major changes the plan would bring, rebutted the distorted charges of his opponents, and inspired his allies with an emotional appeal to enact the plan as a posthumous memorial to Senator Ted Kennedy.

The end result was a rise in Obama's poll numbers. The first to report were CNN and the Democracy Corps, both of which questioned voters before the president's congressional address and then again immediately afterward. Because, not surprisingly, Democrats were more likely to watch Obama's speech than Republicans, the CNN survey somewhat oversampled Democratic identifiers. Even so, considering that Obama's approval ratings had declined seriously among Democrats over the summer, the results were encouraging for the president. CNN found that three-quarters (77%) of those who watched the speech had a positive reaction to it overall, with 56% being very positive.  Nearly as many (72%) believed that Obama clearly stated the goals for his health care plan in his speech. As a result, the president's numbers improved significantly on a number of key items. After the address, 70% believed that Barack Obama's policies would move the country in the right direction as compared with 60% who felt that way before. Most important, the number favoring the president's health care reform plan rose sharply to 67% from 53%.

The Democracy Corps used electronic dials to gauge the perceptions of 50 "independent and weak partisan" voters in Denver before, during, and immediately after President Obama's speech. Those who participated in the Democracy Corps research were about evenly divided among those who initially supported and opposed the president's health care reform plan and McCain and Obama voters. Among these swing voters, support for Obama's plan rose 20 points (from 46% before the address to 66% after). Moreover, attitudes toward specific aspects of the plan improved sharply following the address.

So far the afterglow from President Obama's speech has had legs. On the Gallup daily tracking of his job performance, the president's approval versus disapproval margin has gone up from nine percentage points to thirteen since his address. In the public survey with the most consistently Republican tilt, the Rasmussen Reports, the number who strongly approve of Obama's performance is up five points since the speech while those who strongly disapprove is down four. Overall, after spending nearly all of August on the downside, a slight majority is now positive about the job President Obama is doing (52% vs. 48%). These are the president's highest marks in the Rasmussen surveys since mid-July.

A CNN-Opinion Research survey conducted with a representative national sample over the weekend after Obama's address provides even greater detail-and more good news. That survey indicates that the president's approval score rose five points since late August (to 58% from 53%). During the same period, Obama's approval rating is up solidly for his handling of specific policy areas: the federal budget deficit (+10 points); taxes (+7); health care policy (+7); the economy (+5); and, foreign affairs (+4). Finally, undoubtedly as a direct result of his address to congress, a majority now favors rather than opposes Obama's plan to reform health care (51% vs. 46%). Most important, strong opposition to the president's plan declined by nine percentage points since CNN last polled on the matter.

But the biggest jump in Barack Obama's poll ratings came in the Daily Kos weekly tracking survey. In just one week, the president's overall favorable to unfavorable margin improved by eight percentage points (favorable up 4 points and unfavorable down 4). Obama's favorable marks week-to-week improved in virtually very demographic and political group except among Republicans. However, the biggest gains came within Democratic core groups including Millennials (young people born 1982-2003), Latinos, residents of the Northeast, and Democratic identifiers. This suggests that, after a period of drift during the summer, what President Obama said last week, especially in his health care reform address, reinforced his base. There is little doubt that Democrats are simply glad that the president is sounding like the man they put in the White House last November.

Unfortunately, President Obama's Democratic colleagues in Congress did not share in the week's polling upswing. The Daily Kos survey indicates that the favorable ratings of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and congressional Democrats overall were essentially unchanged during a week in which the president registered significant gains. Perhaps it is for this reason that GOP consultants are telling Republican candidates to attack congressional Democrats, rather than President Obama, in the 2010-midterm elections. (http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/09/gop_in_2010_focus_on_dems_in_congress_not_on_obama.php)

 It seems clear that the public, even the Democratic base, is taking a wait and see attitude about inside-the-Beltway Democrats other than President Obama. The coming months will determine whether or not the Democratic majority in Congress is prepared to do the job that it was sent to Washington to do and, among other things, at long last enact meaningful health care reform. This week's polling numbers suggest that would not only be good for America, but also for congressional Democrats. Let's hope they're paying attention.

Michael D. Hais is an NDN Fellow and co-author, with Morley Winograd, of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, You Tube, and the Future of American Politics, named one of the ten favorite books of 2008 by the New York Times.

For the last few years I've written a great deal about how I believed that there was no way to understand the recent conservative ascendancy in American politics without understanding that at its core was an ugly intolerance, a sustained and strategic exploitation of racial fear, a divisive politics which became known as the Southern Strategy.  I discussed this idea at length in a recent video essay called The Politics of Intolerance. 

I have also argued that for the modern GOP to have a fighting chance at appealing to the more racially diverse America of the 21st century, it would have to do more than adapt to the new demographic realities of our country.  The new leaders of the GOP would have to acknowledge and repudiate the ugly intolerance at the core of the Southern Strategy.  It is also something that I have never been terribly optimistic that would happen, certainly not in the next few years.

Which is why I found this passage from a NY Times blog, reviewing an interview with RNC Chairman Michael Steele, so interesting:

During this interview, Wolf Blitzer, the CNN host, confronted Mr. Steele with the composition of the Republican House and Senate — displaying the nearly all-white makeup on the G.O.P. side against the polyglot of the Democrats during the joint session of Congress which Mr. Obama addressed. (The setting where Congressman Wilson uttered his outburst.)

Mr. Steele acknowledged the racial divide between the parties: “I’ll accept the indictment. I’ll accept it, you know. And I — and I know we’ve got to change. And our party has, for over a generation, employed a strategy that right now we wish — many of us wish we never had."

"Many of us wish we never had."  Wow.  All of us need to hear more about this from Michael Steele in the days ahead.  What exactly does this mean, Chairman Steele? That you have regret over Willie Horton, the demonization of Hispanics, the caricatures of the Welfare Queen, of systemic voter suppression and so much more?

There are many reasons we helped launch this new campaign, Drop Dobbs, these past few days.  But chief among them is the desire to continue to liberate America from the destructive racial politics of the Southern Strategy era of American politics, an era which Lou Dobbs seems to be relentlessly unwilling to let go of.   This statement by Michael Steele gives me hope that the once proud party of Lincoln can once again embrace its heritage and help us confront - and then move beyond - the modern GOP's shameful Southern Strategy brand of politics.

NPR's website is running a story by Liz Halloran today about Eric Holder's decision to investigate the CIA, which includes some observations from yours truly:

It didn't help Obama's standing in the liberal community that on the same day Holder appointed John Durham to investigate the CIA's interrogation tactics, the White House said it would continue the Bush administration practice of transferring suspected terrorists to other countries to be held and interrogated.

The administration said that the practice, known as rendition and condemned by human rights advocates, would proceed with more oversight.

"I think the Obama administration is having a hard time calibrating all of this," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network. "They were left a bad set of practices and realities by the Bush administration."

"The Obama team is finding that unraveling this is harder than they thought it would be, and they're trying," Rosenberg says. "But we're going to be having this debate a long time, and this [inquiry] is an important step."

That debate, he says, will necessarily involve how the country treated terrorism suspects in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Suggestions that discussion about what happened in the Bush era is either partisan or out-of-bounds is ridiculous," he says. "Laws may have been broken, and our standing in the world was affected."

"We need to have a conversation about this in our country."

That conversation may be one the president wanted to avoid, but it's one his supporters have insisted on. But many remain unsure of what Obama will do when the investigation is complete and when someone will have to decide whether and how to act on the facts.

It order for you to know where you want to go it sure is helpful to understand where exactly you have been.

Eric Holder's decision was clearly the right one.  We need to know more about what happened with these matters in the Bush era.  This is a good first step.  And enough already with the GOP arrogantly defending the CIA now, after spending much of the Bush era blaming it for all the President's mistakes.

In Washington perception is often reality and, based on the reported results of two new surveys, one by the New York Times and CBS and the other by the Wall Street Journal and NBC, the perception du jour in DC is that President Barack Obama has lost ground because of public concern with government spending, the deficit, and, perhaps most of all, the General Motors "bailout." The New York Times story on its survey is even headlined, "In poll, Obama is seen as ineffective on the economy.

But a look beneath the headlines to the survey data itself indicates that New York Times writers, or at least their headline writer, may have misread their own poll results. Instead of condemning of the president's handling of the economy, in the New York Times/CBS survey, the public actually approves of it by a greater than twenty-percentage point margin (57% vs. 35%), statistically unchanged since the first weeks of the administration. In the aftermath of the president's recent trip to the Middle East and Europe, his marks in foreign policy have actually risen since May.  And, even in health care reform, a work in progress and a relative soft spot for Obama, voters approve of his performance by 44-percent to 34-percent.

As a result, Obama's overall job approval rating is unchanged over the past month, down slightly since April, and even up marginally since February and March. To the extent that the president's performance rating has fallen, the drop has been almost totally concentrated among Republicans.

What may contribute to the expectation that Obama is standing on shaky ground, or soon will be, is another incorrect inside-the-beltway perception, this one primarily advanced by Republican commentators since the president's election, that America is "conservative," "center right" or at least "centrist." More often than not these pronouncements stem from narrowly focused interpretations of surveys suggesting that the number of "independents" in the electorate is growing and that self-perceived independents represent some amorphous, undifferentiated group of "centrists" who are decisive in U.S. politics.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The large majority (about 80%) of those who tell pollsters they are independents actually "lean" to one or the other of the two parties. Those who lean to the Democrats differ demographically and, even more importantly, behaviorally and attitudinally from those who lean to the GOP. As a result, the electorate is far more partisan than superficial analyses of survey results might suggest. Currently, the Democrats hold a substantial and growing edge over the Republicans among independents who lean toward a party. About six in ten "leaners" now tilt to the Democrats. Coupled with their large lead among those who do identify with a party, the Democrats are clearly operating as the country's decisive majority party.

John P. Avlon, who served on the policy and speech writing teams of Rudy Giuliani's abbreviated 2008 presidential campaign, is only the most recent of those professing the importance of centrist independents. Citing Pew Research Center data, Avlon claimed in an early June Wall Street Journal article that the number of self-identified independents in the electorate has risen sharply since Obama's win last November while the percentage of both Democrats and Republicans has fallen. Because of these post-election shifts, according to Avlon, "independents hold the balance of power in the Obama era."

On the surface, Avlon's description of the Pew data may be accurate. But his characterization of party identification data is shallow and incomplete. Avlon, like most of those who write about the distribution of party identifiers within the US electorate, refers to only three discrete and presumably undifferentiated categories of voters--Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

However, voting behavior analysts affiliated with the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, who first formulated the concept of party identification in the 1950s, recognized early on that those who identify with a particular political party do so with varying degrees of strength, while those who say they are independents may lean toward one or the other of the parties. As a result, the Michigan researchers developed a seven-point scale to more fully capture the actual complexity of party identification. This scale consists of Strong Democrats on one extreme and Strong Republicans on the other. In between the two extremes are Weak Democrats, Independents who lean to the Democrats, Independents who lean to the Republicans and Weak Republicans. In the very center of the scale are Independents who do not lean to either party.

All of this might only be of academic interest were it not for the crucial importance of party identification. Party identification represents a psychological attachment of voters to a political party. While it certainly is not a contractual obligation to support a party, the large majority of Americans vote for the party with which they identify or to which they lean--and they almost always adhere to its positions on issues as well . Political scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that party identification is the single most important factor shaping the choices of individual voters. In the aggregate, these numbers really do matter.  The distribution of party identifiers and leaners is the clearest indicator of the relative strength of the two parties within the U.S. electorate and has now tilted heavily toward the Democrats.

Utilizing the more complete and useful seven-point scale rather than a three-point division paints a far different picture of American voters than the one that Avlon and most of those who report on trends in party identification paint. Based on April 2009 data that is the most recent cited by Pew, here is the overall distribution of party identifiers in the U.S.:

* Table does not total 100% due to rounding

This table makes several points very clear. First, the Democrats are clearly the majority party holding a decisive twenty-percentage point party ID lead over the Republicans (54% to 34%). Second, barely one in ten voters is a non-leaning independent; rather than being the decisive center, non-committed voters actually comprise a small minority of the electorate.

The following table, also using Pew tracking data, displays the distribution of party identification for all election years from 1990 through 2006 and for every year since then. 

These results lead to a number of clear and important conclusions about the distribution of party identification across the American electorate during the past two decades.

• The Democrats have generally held the edge throughout the entire period. But, that advantage was relatively small during the 1990s and the first three election years of this century. The Democratic margin widened a bit in the two years when Bill Clinton won the presidency (1992 and 1996) and 1998, when some voters may have turned against the GOP in reaction to a politically motivated impeachment effort. By contrast, the Republicans reached parity with the Democrats in 1994, the year of the Gingrich revolution that saw the GOP gain control of Congress, and 2002, when the nation rallied to a Republican president in the aftermath of 9/11.

• The Democratic advantage has sharply and consistently widened since the 2006 midterm elections when that party regained control of Congress. A number of factors--the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, an increasingly diverse electorate, the emergence of the Millennial Generation (young Americans born 1982-2003), the election and continued appeal of Barack Obama--have all undoubtedly contributed to the Democrats' increased party identification lead. Regardless of the relative importance of these and other factors, a greater percentage of American voters now identifies as Democrats or leans Democratic than at any time since Lyndon Johnson's landslide 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater. The Democratic margin over the GOP is larger than at any time since the post-Watergate period of the mid-1970s.

• The number of completely non-affiliated voters has slightly, but consistently, declined each year since 2006. Rather than becoming more crucial, as writers such as Avlon suggest, unattached independents have actually become less important during past several years.

All of this leaves President Obama and congressional Democrats in strong position as they prepare for the major battles ahead on health care reform and energy--if they have the courage to avoid giving in to incorrect Washington perceptions and, instead, take advantage of the rare opportunity that the American electorate has given them.

For those wanting to learn more about and discuss the compelling issue of how to best fix our broken immigration system, please join us today at noon either here at NDN or online for an event, "Immigration Reform: Politics, Public Opinion and Legislative Prospects."  For more information or to rsvp go here.

Hope to see you later today.....

President Barack Obama is hitting the commencement trail. He gave a truly inspiring speech last night at Arizona State University and is headed to Notre Dame (a little bit of controversy brewing there) on Sunday.

Atlantic Media's (National Journal, The Atlantic, etc..) powerhouse political director Ron Brownstein has a fantastic piece on these young college graduates and their political preferences. In his report, he extensively quotes NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, who've just wrapped up the most recent stretch of their book tour for the new paperback edition of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics.

Brownstein writes about the huge edge Obama and the Democrats have with Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, and the largest and most progressive U.S. generation ever.

"If anything, Obama's position with the Millennial generation appears even stronger today. Apart from African-Americans, these young people have been Obama's most enthusiastic and consistent supporters in office. In the Gallup tracking polling that's been conducted since January, Obama's approval rating among voters younger than 30 has never fallen below 66%. His approval rating among young voters consistently runs somewhere between six and nine points higher than his overall showing: today, Obama receives positive approval ratings from a dizzying 75% of voters under 30, compared to 66% from the country overall.

Another set of numbers Gallup released earlier this month shows how Obama's strength can bolster his party. Gallup cumulated all of its 123,000 interviews this year to examine party identification in the electorate. Among the Millennial generation, it found that just 21% identify as Republicans, compared to 36% as Democrats and 34% as independents. "Republicans, for all practical purposes, aren't even on the radar screen with them," says Michael D. Hais, a fellow at the Democratic advocacy group NDN, and co-author of Millennial Makeover, a recent book on the generation.

The enormous advantage among young people for Obama in particular and Democrats in general matters for two reasons. The more immediate is that this generation, which is generally defined as the 93 million people born between 1983 and 2002, will comprise a rapidly increasing share of voters through the next decade. Hais and his co-author, Morley Winograd, also an NDN fellow, have calculated that in 2008, 41% of Millennials were eligible to vote, and they constituted 17% of the electorate. They project that by 2012, 61% of the Millennials will be eligible, and they'll comprise 24% of the electorate; by 2016, the numbers will reach 80% and 30%. By 2020, virtually all of them will be eligible and they could constitute as much as 36% of all voters. If Obama maintains anything near his current strength among Millennials, they will produce a substantially larger vote surplus for him in 2012 than they did in 2008-leaving Republicans a larger deficit to overcome with older voters."

Morley and Mike have been speaking out on this issue (How to Lose a Generation) quite a bit lately. Last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Morley and Mike, "The Republican Party ignores 'millennials' at its peril." Later in the week and further north, the San Francisco Chronicle's Carla Marinucci had a front page story about the GOP's problems with young voters. Her article, "Is Meghan McCain the New Face of the GOP?" was a truly interesting read, with a lot of great quotes from Morley and Mike.

As I noted, the Millennial Generation is the largest ever -- and very engaged, both socially and politically. If I were a Republican, I'd take one look at those numbers and do some very serious "rebranding" -- and soul searching.

For much, much more on Millennials, click here.

Let's say you lose your job at a construction company because not as many Americans can afford to buy a house right now. Just because you don't have that job doesn't mean your son doesn't need braces or your daughter needs to go the doctor. So how do you pay for it? Many Americans reach for their credit cards.

Credit card debt has exploded exponentially over the years and is growing even more as people lose jobs and aren't able to turn to family or friends for financial help. In some cases, credit card companies have taken advantage of this recession, raising interest rates to make more money or tacking on hidden fees.

In past years, Congress has tried to do something about this. From 1995 to 2002, I worked for U.S. Sen. Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin who feels strongly about this issue. He proposed legislation that required what he called "nutrtional labels" for credit cards. Nothing complicated about it. Labels on boxes of cookies have more information that credit card companies are required to disclose. Durbin's legislation would have required companies to spell out just how much you'd be paying over how long if your balance was X or Y.

Well, the credit card companies won that round, but Durbin has kept at it, as he always does, and his former Senate colleague, now the POTUS, is betting that a public tired of greed and corruption are going call on their Members of Congress to do something about abusive credit card practices.

In his weekly radio and Internet address, President Barack Obama does just that. While the president says our economy shows sign of improvment, we still have a long way to go. And credit companies shouldn't be making a mint off of this recession. The House has passed such legislation; now it's the Senate's turn.

Associated Press' Phil Elliot has this write up:

Obama: Send me credit card legislation this month

By PHILIP ELLIOTT – 3 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Send me a bill that stops credit card companies from taking advantage of consumers, and do it by month's end, President Barack Obama is demanding of Congress.

But there's no guarantee lawmakers will deliver by Memorial Day, and the banking industry is fighting back.

"Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. "But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties and hidden fees that have become all too common."

Legislation known as the Credit Card Holders' Bill of Rights has passed the House and awaits action in the Senate, possibly in the coming week.

"You shouldn't have to fear that any new credit card is going to come with strings attached, nor should you need a magnifying glass and a reference book to read a credit card application. And the abuses in our credit card industry have only multiplied in the midst of this recession, when Americans can least afford to bear an extra burden," the president said.

The House measure would prohibit double-cycle billing and retroactive rate increases, and prevent companies from giving credit cards to anyone under 18.

Obama wants to sign the legislation by Memorial Day. "There is no time for delay. We need a durable and successful flow of credit in our economy, but we can't tolerate profits that depend upon misleading working families. Those days are over," he said.

President Obama is headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico, this coming Thursday for a town hall meeting to drum up support for the legislation. In the meantime, you can watch the address here.

NDN is excited to invite you to a special forum this coming Tuesday, May 5, where we will be joined by the editors of three of the nation's smartest publications -- Franklin Foer of The New Republic, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect and Michael Tomasky of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas -- to reflect on the early days of Barack Obama's young presidency and what lies ahead. 

President Obama's poll numbers remain stratospheric. The Republicans are at a loss, a party plagued by infighting and an inability to respond to a popular president. The Administration has taken unprecedented action in the financial and auto industries, won passage of a massive economic recovery package, shifted America's foreign policy and been confronted by a global health crisis.

Joining NDN President Simon Rosenberg to talk about the new politics of the day will be Tomasky, who also is the American editor-at-large of The Guardian (UK), on whose Web site he writes a blog; Foer, who also wrote the international bestseller, "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization," which has been translated into 27 languages—from German to Indonesian; and Schmitt, who was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation where he helped to develop a new initiative on The Next Social Contract, an effort to find the underlying principles and policies appropriate to the emerging economy.

So please join us Tuesday, May 5, at 12 p.m ET, with lunch beginning at 11:30 a.m. If you're not in Washington or can't break away from work, the forum will be live Webcast at http://www.ndnblog.org/livecast starting at 12:15 p.m. We also will be taking questions from our livecast audience and you can submit your questions online at questions@ndn.org.  To RSVP for this event, please click here. For fuller bios, event location and other information, click here. 

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. In the meantime, please read these great articles written by Tomasky, Foer (and colleague Noam Scheiber) and Schmitt on Obama's 100 Days. Each has a unique and fascinating perspective.

100 Days: Setting the Tone for America, Michael Tomasky, guaurdian.co.uk, 4/29/09

The Nudge-ocracy: Barack Obama's new theory of the state, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber, The New Republic, 5/06/09

The Myth of 100 Days, Mark Schmitt, The American Prospect, 4/29/09