Category: politics

Dancing for the youth vote

In the short days since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, there has been a concerted effort to portray Vice President Kamala Harris as the Voice of Generation Z.

It begins—where else?—on TikTok.  TikTok is now overflowing with “Kamala is BRAT” memes, in which video clips of the dancing vice president are juxtaposed with rap music and various urban settings.

Meanwhile, the DNC has enlisted a handful of Gen Z music celebrities—all of whom have a long track record of being left-of-center anyway—as Harris shills.

One of these, Olivia Rodrigo, is a constant source of boilerplate, knee-jerk leftism. When I read that Rodrigo had jumped on the Harris bandwagon, I was like: “Well, of course.” Did anyone really believe that Rodrigo and her camp followers were poised to vote for Trump, until the Democratic Party swapped the 81-year-old Biden for the (ahem!) 59-year-old Harris?

Nevertheless, we may concede a point here. The 59-year-old Harris is 22 years younger than President Biden, and 18 years younger than former President Trump. The Democratic Party ticket is now headed by someone the age of the typical grandparent, versus the typical great-grandparent.

A personal aside: I was already in junior high when my maternal grandparents were 59 years old. They were in their early 60s when I was in high school.

Their sixties. VP Harris is soon to enter that senior citizen territory herself. The vice president was born on October 23, 1964. So she’ll be 60 years old on Election Day.

Generationally speaking, Harris has a lot more in common with Trump than she does with Gen Z voters. Trump and Harris are both—wait for it!—members of that much-maligned Baby Boomer generation, which was born between 1946 and 1964. Trump was among the cohort of the earliest Boomers, and Harris was among the latest.

But a Boomer is a Boomer. You can say, “Okay, Boomer,” to either Harris or Trump, and still be technically correct.

Another personal aside: I’m 4 years younger than Vice President Harris, born in 1968. At 56, I would never claim to be fully relatable to one of 2024’s 18-year-olds, who were born in 2006.

Too much time has passed. I was 18 in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Internet was unheard of, and America was a fundamentally sane place.

There is only one candidate in the race so far who can even marginally claim the mantle of youth candidate: Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Born in 1984, J.D. Vance will enter his 40s next month. Vance is not a Boomer, nor even a Gen Xer, but a Millennial.

Vance is 20 years younger than Harris. He came of age with the Internet. His formative experiences are not exactly those of Gen Z, but he’s the closest thing to a Zoomer that the race currently has.

The media, though, has ignored J.D. Vance’s youthful status. Vance doesn’t fit the mainstream media narrative. “Youth” must belong to the Democrats. I suspect that the media also resists the notion that a “youth” candidate could be anything but a woman from a diverse ethnic/racial background. J.D. Vance is white, male, heterosexual, Appalachian…and young. That’s a combination that the mind of the typical mainstream media journalist simply cannot process.

But maybe the emphasis on superficial youth is misguided, anyway. If youth were the priority in a leader, both parties would run nothing but 35-year-olds (35 being the minimum legal age for POTUS).

Ronald Reagan, moreover, did very well with young voters in 1980. Reagan was 69, and our oldest presidential contender at that time.

It might be better to ask: what are the priorities of Generation Z? Having a hip, youthful leader who will dance in the Oval Office?

I would wager that the average young voter accepts and expects that the next POTUS will be significantly older than them, both chronologically and temperamentally.

Savvy young people also grasp when older people are pandering to them. And they can guess at ulterior motives. Anyone with a teenage son or daughter will agree.

The mainstream media tells us that Gen Z voters mainly want a.) an abortion clinic on every corner and b.) a relentless societal focus on LGBTQ issues. We are also told that every young person is obsessed over the situation in Palestine.

I wouldn’t deny that there are some young people with that combination of priorities, but such a perception skews disproportionately toward college students, who are disproportionately left-leaning.

But haven’t you heard? Fewer young people are college students than has been the case in decades, and young male college enrollment is way down. The student protestors on CNN are not necessarily the voices of their generation.

I wouldn’t bill myself as the voice of Gen Z. (Like I said, I’m 56.) But I do have opportunities to talk to many of them in my social circle here in Ohio.

Yesterday I spoke to a 26-year-old restaurant worker who is also the mother of a six-year-old. She is not married, but she is in a long-term, monogamous heterosexual relationship with the father of her child. She and her partner are focused on buying a house.

Is she also focused on Pride celebrations, abortion, and Palestine? Perhaps, but I’m skeptical. I’ve spoken to this young woman many times. Like most young parents since time immemorial, her focus is on kitchen-table issues.

I’m not implying that all members of Gen Z hold conservative views. The polling shows otherwise. And even if the polling is skewed toward the views of left-of-center university students, it can’t be ignored completely.

What all young voters want, however (even if they won’t admit it), is a POTUS who unabashedly acts like a full-fledged adult. From a young person’s perspective, the POTUS is not a weekend buddy, nor even a parent or a professor. The POTUS is a distant figure who (hopefully) provides a secure, prosperous environment in which the young can thrive.

Nor am I pointing my finger only at Vice President Harris. During the last presidential debate on June 27, both Trump and Biden—our oldest candidates ever—waxed juvenile at times. (Remember their brief back-and-forth about golf?)

But if there is one party that consistently bends over backward to play the faux hipster, the make-believe youngster, that would be the Democratic Party. This has been true since at least 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for the first time.

It’s a fool’s errand, anyway, whichever party does it. Take it from an 18-year-old of 1986, who can still remember the way I saw most anyone over the age of 29 or 30. From the perspective of 18, both 59 (Harris) and 78 (Trump) look, well, old. And you won’t fool any young person with bad dancing.

-ET

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.

Marlene Dietrich
JFK

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

**View SEX WITH PRESIDENTS on Amazon**

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.  At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

 

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Kristen Clarke

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET