Berkley Center

Government has become a porous entity. By porous I mean that the buck stops nowhere. The buck – responsibility for failure, the burden of explaining to a wronged public – falls into the abyss while politicians lurk, waiting for more opportune moments. Barack Obama never said, “I’m sorry. Closing Guantanamo was infeasible.” Instead, after the issue lost its use, the subject was dropped without much fanfare (maybe an aide spoke to the issue). News cycles quickly replaced neglected promises with new ones. Millennials find that promises are made and broken easily, but have no means of ensuring accountability.

So politicians avoid the limelight, preferring to shy away into anonymity until they're certain of success. This elusiveness and the tendency to obfuscate, lest a sound byte bite them later on, are thoroughly confusing for followers of politics. There’s no one to accept blame when things go wrong and a host of people clamoring for plaudits when they go right.

The most confounded are millennials, who attached themselves to the transcendent Obama campaign. It rose above the mire of their confusion by alleging the rest of Washington lacked honesty. Barack was cast as a Washington outsider, foreign to these games of blame avoidance. But their trust in him has faded as it has with all of the political establishment’s figureheads. Among my generation, a sense of isolation from and revulsion of government is growing.

That’s not merely because Millennials need a better blame game with fewer escapes. They want forthrightness. It’s is a quality our politicians lack when it comes to the negatives and positives of governing. They will take credit for jobs increases that have little to do with their efforts and disappear when those same numbers turn sour.

Millennials are expert at understanding humanistically and inclusively. Contrived political personalities, however, are as inhuman as they come and are foreign to millennials. Consider high-level politicians as similar to financiers: they both disappeared (according to popular conceptions) when it came time to dole out responsibility for failures. To punish that, many millennials took part in the Occupy movement. Similarly, Obama offered the promise of shocking Washington insiders into right, human action. Young people thought Barack could force Washington into talking honestly with the governed. His promise has faded, so only 46 percent of my cohort are certain to vote in November. They see no humans in the political sphere, only a swelling number of PR machines. There aren't many politicians they can comfortably say they know and trust.

Too many politicians promise things, like jobs, which they are in no real position to provide. Millennials need a candidate who will speak honestly and realistically to them. They are the most educated generation, after all, and many see the vapidity of presidential rhetoric. No more Teflon presidents...the Millennials want a real person, someone who is not party to the Washington culture of sleuthing out of blame, but ready and eager to be a human: meaning, to accept blame when necessary and be honest about the state of the nation. Millennials want the straight dope, and hopefully then they will vote.