opinion

It's hard to pinpoint a precise moment when young Americans, who were so galvanized by Barack Obama's presidential campaign, lost faith in their president.

Maybe it was when Obama signed an executive order to shut down Gitmo rather than actually closing the prison. Or maybe it was when he proposed his own indeterminate military surge in Afghanistan. Or maybe when he refused to take responsibility for unchanged energy policies that enabled offshore drillers to wreak havoc on the Gulf Coast.

Like many college students I've interviewed, the moment came for me last spring when Obama stood silent during the peak of California's education crisis. As thousands of students, parents and faculty members protested statewide budget cuts in elementary through high school funding and hikes in college tuition, Obama was nowhere to be found.

Where was the community organizer in chief when Californians engaged in a so-called day of action to defend the integrity of public education?

Young people don't feel so loved. When American youth are hurting, in the classroom and on the street -- impoverished, unemployed and in debt, in many cases -- it's not enough for the administration to blame Congress for inaction. As the president and vice president court the youth vote on college campuses, they are trying to reengage their once-eager youth constituency with the same talking points of the 2008 presidential campaign -- vote or watch the country be returned to President George W. Bush.

"You can't sit it out," Obama is telling students. "Democracy is never a one-and-done proposition."

I thought Obama's midterm and second-term campaign message had to change, from "Yes, we can" to "Yes, we did." Young people are smart enough to know the difference.

While the Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted record funding for education, infrastructure and technological innovation, and while the Affordable Health Care legislation has provided new coverage safeguards, that's where the president had promised the work and policy shifts would just begin, not where they'd end.

Because the president has not faced off against the legislative branch, in speech after speech, he's lost political capital. Congress and now Tea Partiers are bullying Obama time and time again on every issue. The result is reactionary conservatives' growing stature on the national stage.

Two years have been witness to baby steps rather than political activism in the mold of TR, FDR or LBJ. Young people shouldn't just be discovering that they backed a unifier-reconciler-bipartisan over a fierce political leader, but they are.

According to one poll, only 35 percent of young voters said they were very interested in the coming midterm election.

It's hard to spontaneously generate a bubble when the president's mojo is in question and not so much in vogue. Still, being perpetual optimists and largely forward-thinking, most young people refuse to give up. They want their vision of Obama to be reality.

Alexander Heffner is a junior at Harvard University.