Who *really* cost Obama the election? I blame the kids

If the recent mid-terms were a referendum on Obama, why did he do so badly? He's too left-wing, say some. No, he's too right-wing, say others. He's too cool. He's too muslim. He spent too much. He didn't spend enough. And on it went, for every pundit an opinion.

Me? I blame the kids. It's a bit late to the party (one of the hazards of weekly magazine journalism), but my latest column for Maclean's magazine has been posted. The argument is that no one bailed as pathetically on the president as youth voters. Here's the key graph:

Retail politics everywhere is messy, slow, dirty, and dull. But it is all the more so in the United States, where parties are weak and the entire system is designed to make sure that even a president who controls both houses of Congress is forced into endless horse-trading to get anything done. Progressives in America have a choice: they can either do as Obama suggests, and fundamentally change how things actually work, or they can accept the need for a great deal of patience. The first is never going to happen. And neither, if the kids have any say in the matter, will the second. As one college student put it in a piece about the absent youth vote published in the New York Times, “It’s not the fad anymore to be politically knowledgeable and active.” Or as another student put it in the same Times article, “He made young people feel important, and then he got into office and there was no one talking to us.”