Where is margaret hoover

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 by 20 points. Even the first millennials, who were eligible to vote in , split their ticket evenly between George Bush and Al Gore.

This is one explanation for why they rallied to Ronald Reagan in 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.

The ethics scandals in the House of Representatives in — 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 and , Republican identification shrunk in 21 of 25 or 26 areas. That makes this even more imperative. They are 37 percent unemployed. His job-approval rating is down 18 percentage points since January 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.

So who are the millennials? 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. The oldest millennials were eight years old when he left office. 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. 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. 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 is to focus not on social issues but on economic issues and fiscal issues.

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.

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.

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.

This is just the fact. The two teachers unions were 10 percent of the DNC delegates in Another area that always ticks high on the Richter scale in terms of an issue they care about is the environment.

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 was a cover of Newsweek in that showed the Earth freezing over, because they believed the Earth was getting colder. 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. Hoover lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.

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