Obama Tries To Reclaim His Lost Youth

Since Inauguration Day, the president’s approval rating with the 18-to-29 crowd set a record for the most precipitous drop in Gallup Poll history, from 77 percent approval to 48 percent.

Ah, youth.  You think it's going to be there for you forever, but one day you wake up and realize it's gone.  Sure, you can still see vestigial traces of it when you gaze at your reflection, but suddenly you have to look harder and harder and peer closer into the mirror to convince yourself you still are who you thought you were.

And this is the point, of course, when some men will buy a new sports car - a convertible, in flaming red.  Or a woman will take a younger lover (half her age plus seven, right?).  Or, if you're a president, it's a moment when you offer silly proposals to your former paramours, hoping that with it, youth will return.

It is as awkward as it sounds:

No recent promise is more disingenuous than Summer Jobs+. The labor Department of Labor purports to have “180,000 job commitments” from private-sector companies, but only 38 percent (70,000) of these “jobs” pay money. The rest are unpaid internships — a category that Nancy Leppink, an Obama appointee at Labor, declared not “in compliance with the law” as recently as 2010.

The abrupt reversal doesn’t make these positions “jobs.” The 70,000 paid positions offered by the private sector won’t be nearly enough to employ the 1.7 million students who will graduate from college this year.... These 70,000 or even 180,000 new positions promised by the Obama administration wouldn’t even employ 5 percent of the young people now seeking work.

Then there’s the Obama call to expand the student-aid program — mostly through a massive increase ($1 billion to $8 billion) in the Perkins student-loan program.

Making it easier to get a student loan now is as devious as making it easier to get a mortgage a decade ago — the government is encouraging people to take on more debt than they can handle.

Many recent graduates face the same situation as the people who took out subprime loans from 1998 to 2007; the government encouraged them to take out massive loans that they now can’t afford. Student-loan defaults hit a record-breaking 8.8 percent last year.  Growing the student-loan program means dooming more graduates to this same fate...

And the Millennials say to Obama:  No thanks, and keep moving, creep, before I call campus police...

Barack will not recover his Lost Youth.  They may not flock to Mitt Romney, either, but they are smart enough to have learned their lesson, and they won't go back to the man who has already betrayed them.  They'll probably stay home on election night instead.  Which - once he realizes it - will age the president even further, and push those bygone days of "young love" even further into the rear-view mirror...