MARGARET HOOVER, the great granddaughter of the president she calls the first “millennial,” makes the case for a broad and tolerant GOP coalition. Excerpt from “Margaret Hoover: A New Generation of Conservatives and the Future of the Republican Party,” July 26, 2011.

MARGARET HOOVER, Contributor, Fox News; Author, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party

When you look at the demographic data [for] the 30-and-under generation, they are not Republicans. The Republican Party is at risk of losing a rising generation of Americans to Democratic and independent voter rolls for the rest of their lives.

The millennials are 30 and under. They were born at the beginning of the Reagan era through the end of the Clinton presidency. They are the largest generation in American history. There are 17 million more millennials than there are baby boomers. It should come as no surprise: They made the difference in Barack Obama’s election, and they are not Republican.

Why is this urgent? Political identity and partisan identity take on the characteristics of cement over time. It starts soft and then it solidifies. They voted for John Kerry in ’04; they voted for Barack Obama in ’08. Republicans, if we’re serious, have 16 months to make inroads with this generation, or we risk losing them.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I find this deeply troubling, but the reason isn’t just because I’m a Republican. I actually think that the conservative movement and the Republican Party have put forth ideas that are most relevant to this generation, and to the problems in our society and our government that they are most concerned about and that most affect their lives. It’s up to the Republican Party to characterize who these people are, what makes them tick, so that we can reach out to them and connect to them and, hopefully, win their loyalty.

My great-grandfather has informed my perspectives about the party and the conservative movement. He wrote a book in 1922 called American Individualism. He captures in very surprising ways some of the ethos of this next generation.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a Republican. I’ve always, because of my great-grandfather, been a student of his life and legacy, though not many people are. I never knew him. I was born 13 years after he passed away, but my upbringing was informed with stories of him. Despite this heritage, I really shied away from participating in politics when I was growing up. Instead, I studied Spanish-language literature. I studied Mandarin Chinese. I studied abroad in Bolivia and Mexico and China.

When I graduated from college, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan, where I got my first job as a research assistant and editor in a Taiwanese law firm. Everything really changed for me the first day I arrived there, which was September 11, 2001. I realized I wanted nothing more than to be back in the United States, where the deepest expression of patriotism was stirring in my country, something the likes of which none of us had really seen before. I was so moved, as all Americans were, by the words of George W. Bush, and the spirit and leadership of Rudy Giuliani. Everyone was so openly patriotic, including youth. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to participate in the functioning of our democracy.

I thought it would be an incredible honor to work for George W. Bush. I shored up a year in Taiwan, returned to the United States, found my way to Washington by volunteering on a Senate race in my home state of Colorado. I landed a job in the House of Representatives for a member of Congress who was brand new from Miami, because he was looking for somebody who spoke Spanish in his Washington office. So that Spanish paid off. Then I had the good luck of getting a job on President Bush’s re-election campaign in 2003 and receiving a White House appointment in 2004. Then two years later I had the chance to move to New York to work for Rudy Giuliani when he was thinking about running for president.

During the course of the Bush presidency, I sensed a mounting anger amongst my friends in my age group against George W. Bush; in the ’04 campaign and during my tenure at the White House, all of the polling confirmed this observation, that during the Bush presidency all of the Republicans really lost the youth vote. I’m used, by the way, to being in the minority of my peers in terms of politics. In fact, I would argue that as a descendant of Herbert Hoover, I’m actually cut out for it. Herbert Hoover has been the whipping boy for economic hard times throughout my life. It’s gotten worse in my lifetime, not better.

Back to millennials. Some say – and I include Rush Limbaugh in this – that it’s not worth going after youth. They will eventually get there. It’s the old, “If they’re not liberal when they’re 20, they don’t have a heart. If they’re not conservative by the time they’re 40, they don’t have a brain.” If this were true, we’d be off the hook. But Ronald Reagan is our best icon in this sense, and Ronald Reagan brought an entire generation into the Republican Party. This was the Reagan revolution. He won the youth vote in 1984 by 20 points. So it’s just simply not true that Republicans can’t win the youth vote or have never won the youth vote. Even the first millennials, who were eligible to vote in 2000, split their ticket evenly between George Bush and Al Gore.

It’s worth mentioning that youth’s political views are formed by the failures in politics they know. So they don’t have huge amounts of experience and are often reacting negatively to the failures they’ve come to know and subscribing to something else. This is one explanation for why they rallied to Ronald Reagan in 1980. They were rejecting the failures of the Carter administration. Politics is perception. Look, I was proud to work for George W. Bush, and I really defend him, but I also understand why he lost millennials. They believed what John Kerry said, that the Iraq war was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. They believed that [Bush] failed and the federal government failed in Hurricane Katrina. Politics is perception. The ethics scandals in the House of Representatives in 2006 – all of these things really contributed to a rift of youth from the Republican Party and toward what became Obamamania.

Barack Obama really captured the ethos of this generation by talking about a desire to rise above partisanship, an appeal to service, and the resolve to make government work again. Those are things [that] really capture the millennial generation, and areas where we can actually win them back.

One other thing: The Republican Party, if we were growing in other areas, maybe we could afford to lose millennials, but Gallup did this very damning study. Between 2001 and 2009, Republican identification shrunk in 21 of 25 or 26 areas. The only area where we didn’t shrink was in weekly churchgoers. And we didn’t grow either. That makes this even more imperative. The good part is, we actually have an opportunity, because these things that Obama characterized in his election, there’s pretty strong evidence that they’ve been disappointed. They didn’t turn out in the 2010 election nearly in the numbers that they turned out in the previous off-year election cycle in 2006. They are 37 percent unemployed. His job-approval rating is down 18 percentage points since January 2009. It’s still very high, but down 18 points is a significant chunk.

[There are] issues where the Republican Party and the conservative movement are already basically aligned with the sensibilities of this generation, and we need to connect the dots. But there are a couple issues where we’re already there, we just need to make the case. There are other issues where it’s not so obvious, but I think there’s a strong case to be made, like with immigration reform, American exceptionalism, Islamist supremacy, which was formerly known as the war on terror and is now the overseas contingency operation. What I argue is that American individualism, as embodied by Herbert Hoover, is actually a framework for how we can connect to the next generation.

 

Meet the millennials

So who are the millennials? I’m just going to go to three things that we should know about them.

First, they have a positive view of government. They think government should work and can work. Consider the following question. Agree or disagree: When something is run by the government, it is usually managed inefficiently and wastefully. Forty-two percent of millennials agree; 58 percent think that the government is really good at running things. That means that Reagan’s “government is the problem” line simply isn’t going to work. Incidentally, invoking Reagan generally isn’t going to work either. The oldest millennials were eight years old when he left office. So that visceral reaction that people who saw the Reagan revolution get when we invoke Reagan isn’t going to work for this generation.

Second, when it comes to social issues, millennials are the least-traditional generation in America. They adhere least to traditional family structure. They have been raised with more single-parent households. They are the least religious generation. Only a quarter of them identify with organized religion, though 67 percent of them say they pray every day and they consider themselves very spiritual. And they are the only generation where a majority believes in same-sex marriage. They just couldn’t be bothered at all by sexual orientation as an issue. It doesn’t even faze them, and that is an important generational difference.

Also, the culture wars of the ’90s with women’s rights and abortion rights is not a third rail in politics for them. It just isn’t going to rally them to the polls one way or another. They’ve basically arrived at an organic consensus about abortion. They believe it’s morally wrong, but they don’t believe it should be illegal.

Third, their politics are pragmatic, not ideological. So 40 percent of them call themselves moderate, only 29 percent liberal, 28 percent conservative. But they pride themselves on being pragmatic. I think this is why Barack Obama’s rhetoric really appealed to them. Barack Obama was about not red states or blue states but the United States of America. He was about a government that worked.

Given these three things, the issue for Republicans is how we communicate with them in a way that is going to get traction. For the conservative movement and the Republican Party, the way forward for 2012 is to focus not on social issues but on economic issues and fiscal issues. [Millennials] are 37 percent unemployed or underemployed. While President Obama is still personally popular – therefore [blaming] him personally isn’t going to work – we can make the case for a pro-growth economic agenda and describe what that means, and then we have some real traction. They’re not working; they’re open to this idea. In these debates about debt and deficits, we should be talking in terms of generational theft, because the spending that is going on – every dollar that the government has spent is a dollar that you, me and my peers are going to have to pay back, with interest – is nothing more than generational theft. No one my age thinks we’re going to get Social Security or Medicare. The Republicans are the ones who have represented the real hope and change and not Washington politics as usual, because we have not punted. The Republicans are the ones who have taken the fiscal future of the next generation seriously, by offering real alternatives and turning the ship around in Washington in the last 12 months.

There are a couple other issues where we’re already aligned with them, we just need to make the case. One of these issues is education reform. The millennial generation is the most diverse generation in American history. Forty percent non-white, 20 percent have an immigrant parent. The promise of America and American individualism is that everyone – and we decided this a long time ago – will have an equal opportunity to rise above the circumstances of their birth, based on their skills and their talent. Part of that is having a fair shake at a good education. The fact that 30 percent of millennials are dropping out of high school and the overwhelming majority of them are black and Hispanic, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, that our school system is still effectively segregated into poor ZIP codes and rich ZIP codes offends the sensibilities of this generation and has motivated them to service, especially in the form of Teach for America, the KIPP [Knowledge Is Power Program] schools and the alternative education movement.

Movies like “Waiting for Superman” have really galvanized public opinion, especially millennials, and demonstrated the systemic problems in the education system. They are beginning to see that the Democratic Party simply can’t fix it, because their hands are tied by the unions. This isn’t a partisan statement, this isn’t a beating-up-on-unions statement. This is just the fact. Teachers unions donated $40 million to Democratic candidates in 2010. The two teachers unions were 10 percent of the DNC delegates in 2008. It’s just a fact that the real reforms in education across the country are happening in states where Republican governors and Republican legislatures are able to take on the systemic problems, which are really held in place by the teachers unions.

Another area that always ticks high on the Richter scale in terms of an issue they care about is the environment. [In my book,] I talk about conservative environmentalism and forging a platform that is consistent with our history. The Republican Party has Teddy Roosevelt. He really began the environmental movement in this country. We have a strong legacy of environmentalism in this country. There is no reason we can’t have a pro-market, conservative environmentalism. We can admit that the Earth’s climate is changing while still admitting that global climate change or climate science is inexact. There was a cover of Newsweek in 1975 that showed the Earth freezing over, because they believed the Earth was getting colder. Science is inexact, but we don’t need to be global climate change heretics.

 

The Hoover legacy

When I began to think about how to connect millennials to the Republican Party, I realized that Herbert Hoover embodied much of the ethos of the millennial generation 80 years before the first of them were born. He was a technologist. He pioneered and regulated radio waves so that radio could be a thriving commercial industry in this country. He was the first individual – not president – ever to appear on television.

In his mining career, he developed several mining technologies, which at the time, was a cutting-edge career that he actually learned in the heart of the Silicon Valley, at Stanford. He was a globalist. The millennials are more connected internationally and more globally oriented than any generation before them. Herbert Hoover, before he was president, had circumnavigated the globe five times, before the advent of aviation, had worked on four continents, visited six. He was truly the most global president that the country had ever seen. Also dedicated to public service. He was the great humanitarian. This generation, 83 percent of them have volunteered at least once in the past year. They value public service. And he believed that government could work [and] be part of the solution.

He wanted to try to inoculate the United States from trying on the fad of “isms” that Europe was experimenting with – Bolshevism, communism, socialism. He tried to reverse-engineer America, crystallize it down to its essence. He decided that the “ism” in America was individualism, an individual-centered society that was tempered by the notion of equality of opportunity. He knew that his story, because of that ideal, wasn’t possible in any other country in the world. He was born a frontier orphan of no means. He gave a speech [in 1928] here in California called “Rugged Individualism.” He said America had a choice of two futures: choose between “the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines, doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. …Every step of bureaucratizing of the business of our country poisons the very roots of liberalism – that is political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press and equality of opportunity. It is not the road to more liberty, but to less liberty.”

I am struck by how relevant that is to our debates today. These are the themes and the riffs that we hear in the gatherings of the Tea Party. This is the theme and the riff that we hear in the financial regulatory reform debate, that the over-bureaucratizing and regulation of business saps individual initiative and saps economic opportunity. If this is the choice in 2012, we can make the case in a way that millennials will choose the system of Herbert Hoover’s individualism over the alternative.

 

Question & answer session with JOE TUMAN, professor of political and legal communications, San Francisco State University

TUMAN: The millennial generation embraces service to the community, both nonprofit and government-funded. Republicans in Congress tried to close down the Corporation for National and Community Service with a zero budget. How do millennials react to the Republican Party in light of this?

HOOVER: Millennials haven’t been on anything that specific. I could make an argument for the conservative movement where at a time of fiscal distress, we’re trying to shrink government across the board in many, many ways. We can encourage volunteerism and community service without doing it through government. This is the purpose in our country of churches and voluntary organizations, and this vast network, as Herbert Hoover called it, of mediating institutions, community organizations that make up the fabric of our culture.

TUMAN: What I’ve found in my classes is a lot of young people who, like their older predecessors, get what they think about politics informed by watching television. The difference is that many young people get their political information from non-traditional television like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

HOOVER: Which, by the way, is just as ideological.

TUMAN: They’re comedians, not journalists, is the point. Who on the conservative side –

HOOVER: We don’t have funny people.

TUMAN: That’s my point. If you’re trying to attract millennials who are probably drawn to these other sources because they’re funny and maybe that’s a way of speaking to young people, is there something to that, about looking for a different way to talk to people and not take yourself so seriously?

HOOVER: Absolutely. I think conservatives take ourselves way too seriously sometimes. But also think about [this]: Is the corollary to Jon Stewart not talk radio? If we’re talking about entertainers who aren’t in charge of the electorate but are making a political case to an audience who’s basically like-minded – though I like watching Jon Stewart; he makes me laugh. These are ultimately entertainers. I agree. I would love to have more funny Republicans. I think the show on Fox News at 3 a.m. called “Red Eye,” those guys are some of the smartest guys on television.

TUMAN: Going back to the question you had from a young person before, this idea that there’s a perception that some people in the Republican Party ignore science and advocate their position in the face of that, if you have a Stephen Colbert or a Jon Stewart, who will sometimes also goof on a position and take absurdist positions, when a young person watches that they know that they’re not doing that because they’re serious, they’re doing that to be funny.

If a Glenn Beck or a Bill O’Reilly takes an absurd position, he’s not being funny. The perception is that he’s doing that and being serious. That creates the impression that it’s an absurd position and we can’t believe that position so therefore we don’t believe you. Is that a mistake with young people?

HOOVER: Yeah. There’s a clear disconnect. Especially if somebody like Limbaugh – I don’t think O’Reilly fits in this category, because he’s just not an ideologue – who, by the way, I grew up listening to. He says if you don’t listen to me for three weeks, you’re not going to get it. You just won’t get me, my personality, my sense of humor. I think that’s true. If you listen to him for a while, you understand when he’s joking, when he’s being egregious, when he’s exaggerating to make a point. Same with Stewart. I think this is what happens when you’re an entertainer.