Well, I'm Back

Bowing to popular demand - actually just one request, and that from my sister - I am resuming my lonely fight to bring truth, justice, and the American way to one and all, even Lex Luthor.

We've just had an election, turning the country significantly to the right. This is not unusual in mid-term elections where the voters tend to be older and more conservative than in presidential years. For some reason, younger people tend to be uninvolved with politics at the halfway point between presidential elections. The turnout this year among eighteen to twenty-four year olds was estimated at eleven percent, which is about normal.

It's actually kind of interesting to say younger voters tend to be more to the left, considering that their parents thirty years ago were the new conservative wave. I remember a Time magazine article at that time saying that Ronald Reagan was "dynamite on campus." That itself contradicts the presumed pattern of the 1960's, the generation that begat the young Reagan fans. My contemporaries of the '60's who were allegedly all hippie draft-resisters.

Possibly each generation rejects the values of their parents. (Frankly I doubt it. I'm more inclined to think most of us gradually turn into our parents.) More likely, those who do contradict what their elders believe are the ones who get the most attention.

Be all this as it may, we can look forward to almost no federal legislation in the next two years. (And not much state legislation either.) The new House of Representatives will not agree to anything President Obama wants to do, and the president will not stand for any substantive changes in the laws passed in 2009 or 2010. Mr. Obama can (and should) concentrate on foreign relations for the next two years.