apathy and cynicism that had
cemented around us.”
Gordon appreciated Obama’s
push to expand access to
health care. As a child in Bowling Green, where his mother
taught first grade and his father was a professor, he had
suffered from asthma. He remembered listening to his parents arguing with insurance
companies as they sought reimbursement for his care.
“None of those conversations
seemed to end well,” he says.
He believed that Obama
would restore jobs, grasping
that the country was in the
midst of a profound crisis, one
that had hit Ohio and the Rust
Belt with potency.
When he talks about Obama
these days, Gordon sounds as
if he is describing a failed relationship. He is incensed that
the president did not push for a
single-payer health care system,
buying off the insurance lobby
for its support, he says. He feels
Obama’s stimulus spending
package was too small.
“The kind of policies he’s
put through are the right
ones,” Gordon says, “but I
don’t think they have gone
far enough. There has been a
recovery but it’s tepid. I really expected to see more of
an FDR-like program, building
infrastructure, putting people
back to work. I expected to see
a lot more investment in our
nation as a whole.”
Obama has Gordon’s vote
in the bag: Romney disgusts
him. Yet even though Gordon is
himself a politico, having been
elected to the Bowling Green
City Council, he does not plan
to help Obama get out the vote.
“I do that for candidates I believe in,” he says. “A lot of people who were swept up in 2008
are not as engaged this time.”
DRAWING ON THE SIDEWALK
Sarah Griffin would like to be
engaged, but she is too busy
trying to find a job.
In 2008, when she was a sophomore at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, she got
“caught up in the Obama fever.”
Two years later, during the midterm elections, she worked for
Organizing for America, a project
of the Democratic party aimed
at mobilizing people in favor of
Obama’s legislative agenda.
She is not volunteering this
time, she says.
This is in part because she is
disappointed with Obama, who
has turned out to be less of a
change agent than she imagined. Mostly, though, Griffin is
ELECTION
2012
Obama &
Young Voters
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12