Ron Paul Dominates The Iowa Youth Vote, Nextgen.com
“At Tuesday night’s Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney won by a narrow eight votes over Rick Santorum, but Ron Paul dominated among the youth. In fact, of the 18,000 Iowans under the age of 30 who participated in the GOP Caucuses last night, Paul earned the support of 48%, according to data collected by CIRCLE. Rick Santorum came in second with 23%, while Romney gathered just 14% support.
According to those numbers, roughly 8,800 young people caucused for Ron Paul last night. And while that’s still far less than the estimated 30,000 young Iowans who supported Barack Obama in the 2008 caucus, it’s very substantial. Young voters supported Ron Paul in a much higher percentage than any other age group supported any candidate.”
Comment:
I think this confirms quite thoroughly my long-held suspicion that one of Ron Paul’s largest bases is young people. It’s only natural. Young people are still young enough and idealistic enough to be attracted by purist consistency and repelled by the nature of war. And, of course, the economic situation they inherit has the largest effect on their lives for the longest time.
Nothing wrong with that.
However, it does mean that if Ron Paul wants to win over more adult voters, he has to make a more persuasive case than he’s made so far that he would be able to roll-back empire without playing into the hands of those who have an agenda to undermine the country, not merely limit government/empire.
At LRC blog, support by Pimco’s Bill Gross for Ron Paul, is being taken as a good thing, because, supposedly, it shows he’s changing the establishment. My response to that is a bit more circumspect. Hmmm. There are some people you’d rather have opposing you, so extensive is their history of carrying water for the establishment.
Likewise, Paul’s uncritical support for Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and OccupyWallStreet, probably brought him a lot of support among young anarchists and gave him a boost in visibility. But just as likely they lost him the support of more cynical adults who don’t see these leakers, hackers and occupiers (trendy masks, anarchist rhetoric and all) as quite the unadulterated forces for good the media deems them to be.
It’s the embrace of facile positions like these, among other things, that have made me distinctly ambiguous about Paul since 2008.
Only the passage of the horrible NDAA has made me change my stance, although none of my misgivings. Even so, I wonder at the timing of the NDAA – its coincidence with the sudden discovery of chat logs that prove that Assange helped Manning hack into military computers….and some other coincidences I’ll not mention for now.
There are layers of deception here. Let’s just say there are no messiahs on white horses, even in the case of this likeable southern gentleman-politician.
And then, there’s the rigidity of thinking that frequently goes along with naivete of perception.
Not that I think non-interventionism, or, if you prefer, isolationism, is necessarily a naive position. Not at all. Far better to stick with what you know and avoid meddling in matters you know nothing about. But that’s not the situation that presents itself in American foreign policy at this point. We have already meddled...and meddled…and meddled. The real question now is how to successfully extricate ourselves both from our meddling and from the consequences of our meddling. That is an entirely different thing, both analytically and morally.
But in a time and place where appearances count for everything and people are eager to hear what they want to hear, I don’t expect anyone to either note such nuances or care much about them.
More’s the pity.