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RUSH: All right, David… It’s spelled “Leon-hardt.” That’s one name. I don’t know how he pronounces it. There’s a guy in the NFL spelled his name somewhat like that and pronounced it “Leonard,” and I never heard it pronounced and I hate mispronouncing people’s names. When you don’t know how to do it you’ve got to offer all the possibilities. It looks like Leon-heart, Leonard, Leonhard-t.

I don’t mean any disrespect. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Anyway, New York Times: “There was a time not so long ago when the young seemed destined to be liberal forever. Americans in their teens and twenties were to the left of their elders on social issues. They worried more about poverty. They voted strongly Democratic. In retrospect, we refer to this period as the 1960s, and it didn’t last long, let alone forever. Less than a generation after young people were marching for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, they voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan.


“Today, of course, the young are liberal again, and it seems as if they will be forever. They favor same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, stricter gun laws, citizenship for illegal immigrants and an activist government that fights climate change and inequality. The Republican Party… does not,” so they’re hated. (I added that. He didn’t write that.)

“But the temporary nature of the 1960s should serve as a reminder that politics change. What seems permanent can become fleeting. And the Democratic Party, for all its strengths among Americans under 40, has some serious vulnerabilities, too. In the simplest terms, the Democrats control the White House (and, for now, the Senate) at a time when the country is struggling. Economic growth has been disappointing…”

Look, let me cut to the chase here. His point is this: “To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency,” and that’s true. I can show you the polling data. They all think this is all still Bush’s fault, that poor Obama was saddled with a bad economy and a bad everything and a bad Iraq war. It’s the power of the media.

“But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election [2016]. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign.” Not only that, “They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the worldÂ’s problems,” and doesn’t seem interested in fixing anything.

In other words, his point is that the 18- to 21-year-olds who are gonna be voting in 2016 don’t know of Bush, don’t know of the Obama pizzazz and all that. All they know of Obama is abject incompetence, a total mess of a country, and they won’t want any more of it — and his theory is they could make the difference.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I’m told that the guy in the New York Times pronounces his name Leonhardt, David Leonhardt. And his point again is, the Millennials today have totally bought, because of the media — they grew up in a media world. They grew up surrounded by media pummeling George Bush. There was no push-back from Bush. So it makes total sense that young, impressionable minds who had not been, odds are, properly educated on a number of things, as politicized as curricula as schools are, grew up hating Bush and blaming Bush for everything that had gone wrong and got caught up totally in the Obama hype and mentality and so therefore are gone.

They’re committed. It’s gonna be a while before they come around ’cause nobody likes to admit they were wrong. Nobody likes to admit they were fooled. Nobody likes to admit that they had a slick one pulled over on ’em so they’ll stay committed. And they believe that their ideals, there’s no judgment on anything, and whatever anybody wants to do is fine. That’s the definition of tolerance, equality, freedom, fairness, and all that.

But this guy’s point is that people born in 1998, they’re too young to remember the pummeling of Bush in the media, and they’re too young to really have been caught up in the Obama fever of 2008. That they have grown up and matured into their mid- to late teens and early twenties in a mess of a country, and the only president they’ve really known as mature people is Obama. He’s drawing a conclusion here that they’re not gonna want any more of this, and they’re not gonna blame Bush. They’re not gonna blame Republicans. Republicans aren’t in power.

Now, I don’t think that is automatic because you still have the media pummeling people each and every day and protecting Obama and insulating him as much as they can from any of this that is the disaster he has authored. But it is an interesting point. And to say that there is not generational shift and change is to miss another point. There clearly is. And the history of the country is that that has happened, and it’s one of the explanations for the country turning around.

Now, we’re in so deep that one election isn’t gonna make a difference. Not a lasting difference, even winning the presidency. A lot of work needs to be done. But I just think it’s an interesting point, and I wasn’t probably even gonna mention it ’til I saw the Graham Nash story, and I just wanted to be the bearer of bad news for Graham Nash.

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