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Matt Bai breaks down the demographics of age in an Obama era.
For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.
The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.
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The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age. And that means that if reigning Democrats can manage to get health care policy right this time, and maybe even add some fundamental energy reforms, they might still be able to cement more hopeful attitudes about government for generations to come, much as Roosevelt did in his day. Today’s younger voters might never be as party-affiliated as their grandparents were, but neither may they turn out to be as cynical about their leaders as their parents often seem to be. If the president has his way (which is to say, if the worst nightmares of Republicans come to pass), those voters may someday live out their retirements in Arizona or Nevada, spinning stories for their grandchildren of the days when Barack Obama was twice elected president, when government managed once again to make things better instead of worse and when politicians still bothered with these things called town halls.
It is exactly the over 60 crowd, the most vulnerable demographic, which conservatives have been targeting with their lies over health care. Talk of death panels, as ridiculous a notion as it may be, has been affective in taking the debate away from facts and into the realm of the absurd. Fear works.
If the president can sustain the short term pain associated with getting both a health care reform bill off the ground as well as seeing a measurable turnaround in the economy, Republicans will be bitching from a minority position for a long time to come.
(Hat tip: Balloon-Juice)
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Grey power is not to be messed with and for a lot of reasons the message should be addressed to them more than anyone else. Obama needs to be in their place and quelch any lies or inuendos directed to the elderly.
As an elderly,I must admit that my memory is failing and I don’t drive as fast. And things are probably going to get worse for me. But I may get more worried as the years progress. So I need the President to assure me that what is done today will be OK in the future.
I need to hear the full message although death panels are not part of my repertoire. I don’t believe it and I won’t go there.
that look like a mule I used to plow an some times I wish I could do it again.they were hard headed but could learn not like some people I had to do it from sun up to sun down an thought I was having a hard time but now I see my dad was the one that was in the soup trying to work in a cotton mill an on a farm just to put food on the table so people just don’t know what hard times is all about.