Election ‘96: The Young and the Restless

They’re the scourge of post-modern America. They are sometimes called “temporary sociopaths,” “super predators” and “menaces” in the press. They are a major campaign issue, with both presidential candidates stumping in some way to deal with this national problem. They are . . . our children.

“Currently,” writes Gore Vidal in the October issue of GQ, “everyone hates (when not raping or corrupting on the Internet) teenagers.”

In this election season, teenagers have become a face for many of America’s problems--crime, drugs, the quality of education and values. When they’re not being directly targeted, their culture is invoked in a variety of ways. President Clinton has been swift to endorse anti-truancy programs, child curfews and school uniforms. Republican challenger Bob Dole decries rising marijuana use among the young and has lashed out against youth culture as a negative influence.

The candidates say they are out to protect America’s children, not just to blame them. Clinton, stopping in Monrovia recently to praise its school anti-truancy program, said, “Truancy is a warning signal that a child is in trouble and is often a gateway to crime.”

For his part, Dole decries the popular media for its effect on youth: “There can be no question that the perceptions of a 15-year-old are shaped by music and movies and fashion,” he said recently. “And there can be no question that the trendiest trend of our popular culture is the return of drug use.”

Many youth experts, however, say America’s young people are being scapegoated for adult problems. But adults vote, they argue, and teens don’t. Some even call teenagers the Willie Horton of the ’96 campaign, recalling President Bush’s ’88 campaign imagery of an African American convict who killed again after being released on furlough during Gov. Mike Dukakis’ administration.

“It’s Willie Horton Jr.,” says teen crime expert Michael A. Males, a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine. “We’re looking at superficial things--television violence, curfews, whether kids can own guns--because it’s much more unpopular to look at more deep-rooted things such as bad parenting and poverty and violence in the home.”

“I think what you have this year is a campaign that is looking for issues that are safe and that poll well,” says Mark Strama, program director for MTV’s Rock the Vote. “But I don’t think you have anybody who is proposing fundamental solutions to fundamental problems.”

These issues indeed “poll” well. Six in 10 Americans, according to the Washington Post, place educational quality and crime as their top national concerns. Drugs ranked not far behind. Californians, according to the most recent L.A. Times poll, list the economy, taxes, welfare and education as key issues to them.

And there is clearly a wave of anxiety and fear about the young-- which plays out in polls, town hall forums and letters to the editor. When he and his peers were younger, writes one Times reader, “we didn’t rob banks, shoot up the neighborhood and blame society.” Writes another: “I am afraid to walk when teenagers are out.”

This sort of attitude is apparent, even transparent, to the young.

“Society teaches us what we know,” high school junior Jessica Schwartz, 16, says as she kicks it with friends on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

“We learn from adults,” adds friend Jodi Hume, 14. “We can’t possibly fuel the country’s problems because we don’t even have a say in what happens. I think there are a lot of teenagers who are irresponsible, though.”

The statistics indeed suggest some cause for concern. The number of murderers age 10-17 tripled between 1984 and 1994, and the number of teen pot smokers has gone up from 4% to 7% in the past two years, according to government numbers. In years to come, Clinton said recently, “this juvenile crime and drug problem . . . will be almost unbearable, unmanageable and painful.”

Some experts challenge the statistics, however.

Males, who recently wrote, “The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents” (Common Courage Press), argues that rising teen crime statistics don’t apply to California, for one, where the average age of violent criminals--now 28--is actually rising. He also says the perception of teen crime is larger than the problem, citing a 1994 Gallup Poll that found the average adult believes teens commit three times the number of crimes than they actually do. “Serious violence among children is at one of its lowest levels in 15 years,” he says, citing California crime statistics for children under 10.

Further, he says the teen drug problem has been overblown, with a three percentage point increase in marijuana use (and not in other drugs) almost statistically insignificant. He notes that teen drug use is nowhere near its 1979 high (when nearly 17% of the teenagers polled reported using pot in the last month, compared to more than 7% in the most recent survey). “It’s escapism to focus on this,” he says, “and to ignore the more serious adult drug problems.”

Males blames the press and academics who are all too willing to support what he regards as reporters’ false hypotheses about teen problems. In particular, he singles out the image of the teen “super-predator” that has emerged in newsmagazines in the last year--an image of poor, violent and often African American inner-city youth.

“They are portrayed as black, godless, jobless and fatherless,” he says. “This kind of image raises a visceral fear.”

Teen advocates tend to paint teenagers as victims of many of the problems for which they are blamed--victims of drug-using households, domestic violence and poor education. (The candidates have sometimes talked about these issues as well, with Clinton offering measures to reign in deadbeat dads who fail to pay court-ordered child support.)

Males notes that the rate of children killed by adults has outpaced the more publicized teen-on-teen murder rate. Santa Monica attorney Paul Mones, a longtime children’s rights advocate, points out that teen criminals, drug users and smokers overwhelmingly come out of households where parents have the same problems. “Kids who get into trouble,” he says, “come from families with a history of trouble.”

“But it’s very hard to challenge what parents are doing,” he says.

They vote.

Other ways of looking at teen problems get less attention. Consider the recent report, prepared by Bread for the World, which found that 21% of Americans younger than 18 live in poverty, the highest rate of any industrialized nation. This has not become an issue in the campaign.

Targeting teens is safe because teenagers, like other human campaign issues such as welfare recipients, are not a big factor in the electorate. “These targets are often disorganized nonvoters who do not have a lot of defendants,” says Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas.

He theorizes that the candidates have come up with well researched, “low-risk” issues in a campaign year when the economy is stable and no pressing crisis is self-evident.

“Young people run amok, teen mothers on welfare--these are the kinds of issues that become prominent when the politicians get to control the agenda,” Buchanan says.

These images are nothing new. More than one campaign watcher has noted the irony in Clinton’s focus on youth behavior. It was the drug-using, protesting, radical behavior of Clinton’s peers in 1968 that helped Richard M. Nixon ascend to the White House--partly on a much more adamant anti-crime, anti-drug platform. “To some extent these themes have been current in campaigns since Richard Nixon,” Buchanan says.

To be fair, this time around both candidates have made attempts to woo the youth vote, with requisite visits to MTV News’ Tabitha Soren. But as Clinton seems all but guaranteed a victory Nov. 5, the youth vote, like other possible swing votes, is no longer a factor. “Are the candidates talking about issues that inspire young people?” Rock the Vote’s Strama asks. “No. Not this year.”

What will continue to be a factor, say some, is generational conflict. Both Dole (from the World War II “G.I. generation”) and Clinton (a boomer) find it expedient to pick on the generations least likely to vote. At least that’s the way historian and generational expert Neil Howe sees it. He also notes a few ironies: Boomers, who have been the largest consumers of drugs in American history, contributed to its largest crime wave and ushered in its most liberal moral era yet, are now projecting these problems on a generation bred on the very conditions they created; now that boomers are having children of their own, they are working to improve drug abuse awareness, crime and family values.

“Baby boomers are anxious about how in-cohesive America has become, and they’re taking it out by reshaping children,” Howe, who is working on a book of predictions for the next millennium, says. “So Clinton is taking out all these proposals not on reshaping the morals of people his own age, but on the kids.”

Thus, as boomers focus on improving the world for their own children (the “baby boomlet”) the explosion in child crime predicted to come with the explosion of child population will not happen, Howe argues.

“Generation Xers are the weeds,” he says, “and the next generation is the seeds.”