Kieffer Katie - Let me be clear: Barack Obamas war on millennials, and one womans case for hope

Copyright 2014 by Katie Kieffer

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

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ISBN 978-0-8041-3975-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3976-2

Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photography by Deborah Feingold

v3.1

To my heroines
My 100% Irish grandmother, a woman of wondrous wit.
My 100% German grandmother, whose laughter
bubbles like champagne.

and

To the memory of my heroes
My grandfathersa magnanimous Marine and
a stouthearted sailor.

Dear Barack Obama,

Let me begin by borrowing one of your favorite phrases. Let me be clear: I am a young American and I am writing on behalf of my generation. We are the Millennial Generation and we are 95 million strong. I am writing to request accountability for victimizing us for your political gain. You promised us jobs, hope, and change. In the end, you followed through only on the change.

You duped Millennials into voting for you not once but twice and implemented unconstitutional decrees that robbed us of the opportunities that we deserve. We are the first generation of Americans to be financially worse off than our parents. Your puerile policies and pomposity have rendered it nearly impossible for us to achieve the American Dream.

You chatted it up with our favorite hosts like Fallon, Leno, and Stewart; you seemed like a nice, regular guy and Millennials trusted you. You saturated social media with false hope. You endorsed voyeuristic YouTube videos by Hollywood celebrities targeted at college students for your presidential campaign.

With the aid of your teleprompter, you traveled the college-campus circuit, promising us that you would help us find jobs when we graduated and that you would make college more affordable; you encouraged us all to go to college and twisted our arms to take out massive loans. Meanwhile, your administration was profiting off our backs.

Law school students acquired colossal debt and passed the bar exam only to end up working as coffee baristas; Ivy league graduates applied for third-rate jobs just to get by; and youth abandoned their dreams as nurses, doctors, and surgeons to take mind-numbing but higher-paying office jobs within the government.

You told us that you were reforming health care and making it more affordable, but you did not tell young medical students how hard it would be for them to care for their patients or make a profit as physicians under Obamacare. We thought you were being transparent when you told us we could keep our doctor and our health-care plan if we liked it; we didnt realize you had your fingers crossed behind your back.

You promised to create 7 million new jobs and to help entrepreneurs of my generation become the next Steve Jobs. Then you hardly worked on the economy at all; you spent nearly twice as much time on the golf course as you did in economic meetings.

Meanwhile, my generation of highly educated Americans was underemployed and drowning in the student debt that you advised us to take out. Our credit was terrible; we couldnt buy homes and we often had nowhere to turn but our parents basements. We put off marriage, and many of us will delay parenthood for so long that we may never see our own grandchildren.

You sent young men and women into hopeless battles where they had their limbs blown off by savage brutes and earned an epidemic of PTSD. When these brave troops returned home, you withheld their benefits and imprisoned them unjustlysending them spiraling into suicidal depression.

You rendered my entire generation defenseless and vulnerable to terror and violence; you attacked our Second Amendment rights; you threatened to hunt us down with lethal drone force; you allowed young Americans to die in easily preventable terror attacks.

Your administration lied to my friends about guns in order to buy their votes. You did not just mislead; you are culpable for setting us against each other and creating an aura of distrust that clouds our relationships; you are accountable for promoting gun regulations that left us susceptible to mass violence in our schools and workplaces.

You were the Executive Con Man of one gigantic pyramid scheme where young people hustled to knock on doors and get out the vote in both 2008 and 2012 only to be forgotten by you. Once elected, you prioritized getting down in a dance-off with Usher; jetting off to play eighteen holes with Tiger; and eavesdropping on journalists with Holder.

You shirked responsibility for the misery you imposed on my generation. Your economic, social, and national security policies have left both literal and metaphorical bloodstains on your hands for killing the hopes, careers, and dreams of young Americans for your own political gain.

Your administrations lies and incompetence anger me on my own behalf and on behalf of my friends and our parents. You have done such extensive damage to my generation that I decided to share and expose our story. You are now accountable to us. I expect you to read this book; I believe you will find it quite eye-opening.

Sincerely,
Katie Kieffer

Bill Clinton beguiled any attractive young woman who struck his fancy as he made his way through two terms in the White House. Barack Obama outdid Clinton during his own dual presidency, beguiling young men and women alike without leaving even one stained navy blue dress to mark his trail. Obama worked remotelyusing slick and dirty pickup lines to attract youths to his brand and then turning around and crushing the careers, hopes, and dreams of millions of young Americans.

Obamas greatest presidential legacy is also his biggest scandal: Obama literally robbed the cradle. He seduced the Millennial generation into voting for him not once but twice. He captured 60 percent of the eighteen-to-twenty-nine vote in 2012 and an even larger share of the youth vote (66 percent) in 2008. Unlike a young person who could at least find maturity and support in an older partner, Millennials who voted for Obama were left with a shell of a man who had less maturity than they; a man who promised to help them land jobs and pay for college only to leave them jobless while he teed off with his bad boy playmates.

Why did Obama con 95 million young people? For the same reason President John F. Kennedy preyed on an attractive young intern. And for the same reason Clinton said he became an expert in extramarital affairs and dress staining: Just because I could.

Because he could, one summer afternoon in 1962, President John F. Kennedy treated nineteen-year-old White House press office intern Mimi Alford to a swim and two daiquiris. Before she knew it, her first time was taking place on first lady Jacquelines bed. Kennedy continued the affair until his assassination. Alford recounts the liaison in her memoir, telling how Kennedy once put her in the unforgivable position of pressuring her to perform a sexual favor on one of his aideswhile he observed. To think many people worried that Kennedy would take his orders from the pope.