People prone to believing polls might be excused for thinking
that every college kid in America has spent this summer canvassing
precincts for Barack Obama.
Support among younger voters and academics is Obama’s greatest
political strength. One poll last month showed the Democrat with a
12-point advantage among registered voters under 30, while Gallup reported Obama leading 54 percent to 39
percent among those with postgraduate degrees.
Despite such evidence of rampant Hope within academia,
conservative activism on American campuses continues, as evidenced
by the more than 400 students who are gathering in the nation’s
capital this week for the Young America’s Foundation 30th annual
National
Conservative Student Conference.
YAF spokesman Jason
Mattera says Obama’s popularity among students is partly due to
the idealism of youth who are “most susceptible to Obama’s
pie-in-the sky promises,” having had little experience with
“bloated federal bureaucracy” and its consequences. And the
influence of professors is not to be discounted.
A 2005 study “found that 81 percent of political
science professors consider themselves liberal and just 2 percent
as conservative,” Mattera says. “Two percent. With professors
dripping over Barack Obama and conservative ideas seldom taught in
the classroom, it’s no surprise that he is a favorite on
campus.”
YAF is dedicated to promoting another youth hero: Ronald Reagan.
The foundation purchased Reagan’s California ranch in 1998, and has made the site the
center of its efforts to teach the Gipper’s philosophy to a
generation who weren’t even born when he became president.
“Ronald Reagan captured 59 percent of the youth vote in 1984,”
Mattera points out.
Reagan was an enthusiastic supporter of YAF, hosting White House
tours during the group’s annual Washington conferences every year
of his presidency, and delivering a keynote address to the 1993
conference.
Despite the dismal state of the Republican Party — with
President Bush’s approval ratings below 30 percent and the GOP
facing an 11-point disadvantage in the “generic ballot” — Mattera
says there’s still plenty of student enthusiasm for Reagan’s
vision.
Record numbers of students are attending the campus lectures YAF
sponsors nationwide, he says. This year’s national conference,
beginning this morning with a speech by columnist George Will at
the campus of George Washington University, will be the biggest
ever. “Young people are thirsty for conservative ideas, and we’re
happy to quench that thirst,” Mattera says.
YAF promotes a campus insurgency in the war of ideas, training
students in activism and organizing such annual events as “Freedom Week,” an annual commemoration of the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the triumph over communism.
Last year, YAF marked Freedom Week by issuing a “Victims of Che
Guevara”
poster — a collage that used photos of those executed by
Castro’s henchman to compose the face of the man who is a favorite
T-shirt icon of campus leftists.
Teaching such lessons about history, Mattera suggests, might
help inoculate students against the Obamamania epidemic, which he
sees as promising a return to the policies of the man who was in
the White House in 1978 when YAF held its first national
conference.
“Barack Obama has the same liberal ideas that fail every time
they are instituted,” he says. “We need to hear about the gas
shortages of Jimmy Carter, the high inflation, the confiscatory
taxes, and the weak national security. [An Obama presidency] will
be Carter redux.”
The Obama phenomenon shows why organizing campus resistance to
liberalism is so essential, Mattera says.
“The national youth turnout rate rose from nine percent in the
2000 primaries to 17 percent in the 2008 primaries,” he says. “In
swing states with more youthful populations, including Virginia,
Colorado, and Nevada, the youth vote could easily play a monumental
role.”
While boldly staking its place on the conservative side of the
political divide, YAF is officially non-partisan and Mattera
doesn’t hesitate to criticize Republicans for abandoning the Reagan
philosophy.
“The GOP must get its act together,” he says. “Young people
crave choice and services that big government can never provide so
they should be easy constituents for the GOP.”
