Hillary Clinton should address struggling millennials, not James Comey

I experienced a heart-sinking moment this week while watching MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” With just a few days to go before one of the most consequential elections in modern U.S. history, I saw a message crawl across bottom of the screen that read: “Clinton Abandons Positive Pivot.”

If true, this is one of the biggest mistakes that a candidate has made in the home stretch of a national election. Rather than convey the message of a visionary that can redeem the American Dream, the closing message to voters becomes a conversation about the former first lady as a victim of a conspiracy.

Whenever former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comes after FBI Director James Comey, or blames the Russians for the WikiLeaks disclosures, she’s transformed into an Alice down a rabbit hole that dumps her in a Wonderland where Donald Trump is the Mad Hatter and a Greek chorus of deplorables chant, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Americans are drawn to relatable candidates with a sense of self-awareness and self-deprecating humor. The Clinton campaign can’t praise Comey as having the wisdom of Solomon when he decided not to pursue criminal charges over her private server caper, only to turn around and call him a partisan hack when he informs Congress that, thanks to Anthony Weiner, there might be more to the story.

For Clinton, the effective closing argument needs to channel a fusion of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that appeals to Americans’ higher nature. She might as well as swing for the fences because only a sweep of the Oval Office, the House and the Senate will wake this nation from its long toxic nightmare of a national government so divided it feeds on itself even as the conditions of the people continue to deteriorate.

And make no mistake, from the war we never talk about in Afghanistan to the swelling of New York City homeless shelters, where 60,000 people live, 40 percent of them children, America remains very much a “stuck nation” where our partisan divide only gets wider and wider and our ability to get things done atrophies.

In the primary, Clinton had to put a smiley face on the last eight years so as to keep President Obama’s base in line. But in the process of ignoring and sugarcoating the body damage done to average Americans by the Great Recession, she ceded the role of change-agent to Sen. Bernie Sanders and now to Trump.

In these closing days, Clinton has to speak directly to millennials – that 18- to 35-year old demographic is the biggest voting bloc, and collectively these voters hold the fate of the nation, and by extension the planet, in their hands. Their economic circumstance has everything to do with what happened during the Wall Street crime wave that set the stage for the Great Recession and a massive loss of household wealth that is having, and will continue to have, generational consequences. And while Wall Street was made more than whole since, and the banks that were too big to fail are even bigger now, tens of millions of Americans continue to struggle in a hidden affordability crisis where they live paycheck to paycheck.

“The difference in this election will be the millennials,” predicted John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on Morning Joe. “If it was just up to voters over 35, Trump would be up by a couple of points.”

It’s hard for Obama liberals to admit that while they may have saved the nation from a Great Depression, this recovery has been the weakest in modern history, and we have only seen wealth concentration accelerate. Where the generational damage is most pronounced is with our millennials who want change.

Back in 2014 it was the lingering impactof the Great Recession on the millennials that the Council of Economic Advisors flagged as a long-term issue. Millennials’ “lives were shaped by the experience of establishing careers at a time when economic opportunities” were “relatively scarce” even though the economy was “well into its recovery,” leaving its mark on this age group for years to come.

Now we’re seeing that prediction bear fruit. Across all racial categories, a majority of the millennials surveyed by the GenForward Survey believe that the United States is either falling behind or outright failing. For whites, 56 percent say the country is falling behind, while more than 1 in 4 say the country is actually failing. Among African-American, Asian and Latino millennials, two-thirds think the nation is losing ground or failing.

This pessimistic outlook makes sense. For years we talked about the notion that our children, the next generation, might not do as well as us, their parents. In 2016, we’ve seen that become a reality.

For these younger voters, their American experience has been bookended by the September 11 attacks, the never-ending wars that followed and the greatest economic decline since the Great Depression.

Within that time period, the cost of getting a college degree outweighed its benefits on the job market. For decades, we hyped the importance of a college education, and then made it so expensive that college student loan debt exploded from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.36 trillion.

Simultaneously, the value of that degree, in terms of earning power, declined. Earlier this year the Center for American Progress reported that a 30-year old today was making less than a 30-year old ten years earlier, observing that “a 30 year-old today makes about what a 30 year-old did in 1984”.

In the waning days of this election, it’s time that Clinton spoke to those voters.

Bob Hennelly is an award-winning investigative journalist and a contributor to Salon.