Mike and Morley

Originally published in BeInkandescent   In the middle of the 1950s, a seemingly spontaneous revolt against the prevailing conformist values of the country erupted among its youngest generation. The actor, James Dean, and his aptly named movie, “Rebel without a Cause,” perfectly captured the nature of this youthful uprising.His untimely death, in a 1955 high-speed auto accident at the age of 24, made him an everlasting iconic symbol of youthful angst in... Read more

This is a special time for baseball fans. Major league baseball is ready to begin another season, with spring training officially opening this week. With some exceptions, fans in most cities can at least dream of watching their team play in the postseason and maybe even compete for the World Series championship. For them, hope springs eternal. Ditto for the Democratic Party. 2018 appears to be a “wave year,” with an opportunity to win control of the House of Representatives, maybe even the Senate, and then use those majorities to place a major constitutional check... Read more

President Obama will be seen by historians as the first president to bring millennial values to the challenges of the Oval Office. He isn’t a millennial (in fact he has two millennial children), but his leadership style and beliefs reflect America’s largest and most diverse cohort. And while much of the rest of America is divided on how well he has performed as the nation’s 44th president, Obama has won overwhelming approval from the millennial generation, born 1982-2003.More than three-fourths of millennials (77%) approved of Obama’s... Read more

Not since the Vietnam War and the presidential primary campaigns of 1968 and 1972, has America seen as wide a gap in voting behavior between older and younger voters within a political party as the Democrats are experiencing this year. Healing that rift becomes the primary challenge for Hillary Clinton whose general election victory could very well depend on winning over millennials (born 1982-2003) to her side.The youngest adult millennials, those between 18 and 29 years of age, have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in Democratic primaries in states across... Read more

Removing current obstacles to Millennial home ownership would increase the value of the U.S. housing market by at least one trillion dollars over the next five years, representing the sale of around five million homes. America’s housing policies should therefore focus on removing the obstacles to home ownership for this generation in order to bring these “missing Millennials” into the market.  Millennials’ plans for family formation are expected to lead to an increase of 8.3 million homes from now through 2018, worth about $1.6 trillion in... Read more

This year’s Super Tuesday primaries will give both parties a chance to decide which of their candidates offers the best policy prescriptions to address the nation’s challenges.  Surprisingly for a campaign that is supposedly focused on America’s future, many of the ideas being proposed echo proposals from America’s past.  It’s almost as if the ghosts of not just Ronald Reagan, but Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, and Norman Thomas have come back to haunt us, making this one of the scariest presidential campaign seasons in recent memory. For GOP, it’s Reincarnation of... Read more

This February, America will crown its professional football champion, name the best of the previous year’s movies, and begin to set the direction of its presidential politics. In what might be a mixed metaphor, voters in both parties seem torn between the desire to overturn the system that gave us The Big Short or to throw a long pass in one last desperate attempt to win the game within the existing rules. In trying to sort through which of these strategies they want to pursue, voters are demonstrating, once again, the power... Read more

Despite record CNN audiences for its three hours of continuous political debate among the Republican presidential primary candidates last week, the GOP failed once again to engage the Millennial voters it will need to be successful in the 2016 general election. Instead, the whole thing was more likely to remind Millennials of the raucous 2000 version of the movie, “Meet the Parents.” Just as in that comic sendoff of what can go wrong when cultures and generations clash, the evening featured non-stop attacks on the Millennial generation’s heroes and its beliefs.... Read more

As America approaches the 239th celebration of its independence, the events that began with the horrific shooting of innocent churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17th and culminated in an eloquent eulogy to their grace, and God’s, ten days later by President Obama, seemed to signal a shift in the nation’s direction to a more tolerant, inclusive and confident nation. Those three traits are themselves a reflection of the attitudes and beliefs of the increasingly omnipresent Millennial generation. They form the basis for a new civic ethos that... Read more

  Generational trends forecast continued gridlock and partisan rancor in the 114th Congress that opens on January 6. During the past two decades, Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) first shaped and eventually dominated both the way Congress operates and its output, or lack thereof. Given their numbers and the traits that characterize many Boomers, the cohort can be expected to continue its Congressional ascendancy for the next decade or more. During that period Congress is likely to behave pretty much as it has during this century.Boomers became a majority in the House of Representatives in... Read more