Charles Blow on Hillary's "I have Half a Dream" effect on millennials (hat-tip Digby):

Young folks are facing a warming planet, exploding student debt, stunted mobility, stagnant wages and the increasing corporatization of the country due in part to the increasing consolidation of wealth and the impact of that wealth on American institutions. - Blow

As has been pointed out before, this is largely fighting the last 2 elections' problems. Obama expanded a program for student loan relief last year to 5 million people. Stagnant wages up to now has been less important than still-high-unemployment, but now that unemployment is at 5%, the still unhealthy ~2.3-2.5% wage growth has more of a chance of growing. (this article suspects workers have been pushing less hard for wages due to harsher conditions for unemployment benefits). While the planet is warming, renewables are taking off, electric cars are finally hitting the market, and energy costs are dropping due partially to increased solar & wind, but largely due to the rise of contentious fracking. (meaning also that for the first time in my lifetime, we're not really dependent on Mideast oil anymore, while Russia's hold on Europe has also waned). And hey, we're no longer talking about "studying" global warming - we're finally beginning to do something about it.

I haven't researched it, but the rise of new Unicorn entrepreneurs, post-Google and post-Facebook, signal a distinctly unbound access to wealth in the country. (Instagram's founders were 27 and 23 in 2010 - including a Brazilian immigrant - and sold their company 2 years later for $1 billion. This kind of breakthrough is no longer unusual).

Which may signal part of the problem that especially affects millennials. The Venture Capitalist environment has focused on the low-hanging fruit - software-as-a-service, easy viral business models, scalable easy-reproducible solutions. It might be ungraceful to say they're not focused on the hard problems, but many at least are focused on the easy approach to the easier part of hard problems.

So while we have manufacturing jobs on the up-swing, our current trends seem amazingly optimistic compared to manufacturing in the 70's or 1990's or 2000's. Aside from the great oil & renewables improvements, we've even got cloned meat coming along - which stands to change the world's energy, land and water footprint. The deployment of large armies has largely disappeared, ignoring the typical overflights these days.

In short, everything's coming up roses, the new economy's finally on the rise, we're starting to finally get the breath we lost in 2008 or maybe even back in 2001 when the dot-com bubble killed wages, the Bush Administration wiped out the deficit & long-term savings, and his signal accomplishment, the 9/11-completed trifecta, put us in a decade-and-a-half war and a permanent security scare.

Oddly, our final emergence seems to cause more than its share of worry, a panic that things aren't moving fast enough just when they've gotten started moving. You've heard about a half-a-loaf being better than none. But in this case it's more like half-a-loaf's better than owing one.

A great deal has been talked about the head-vs-heart difference between Hillary and Bernie, but maybe after the long hard slog of the Obama years, I'm finding his path "likable enough" - it hasn't been pretty, but could have been worse, and I'm feeling as optimistic with things outside of government, and more than optimistic about tech and social movements outside of government, that I just don't see the compelling reason why I need to "Feel the Bern".

We have addressed the 1%, and we all know income inequality has become a big problem - #OWS brought that home 5 years ago - now we're looking for measures to improve things. We have addressed healthcare - not well enough, but hell, the big pieces just took effect 2 years ago. We largely don't have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Ukraine scare has calmed down - aside from the horrors of ISIS that largely don't affect us, nor our oil supply that's no longer so critical, and runaway immigration from Mexico has calmed down, and the few terror attacks on US soil are trivial compared to our self-inflicted police-and-white-racist wounds that we're at least taking a bit seriously as Act 79 or 81 of our 300 year drama of slavery & racism.

edit: let me highlight that bit - after Vietnam, the oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution/hostage crisis, Central America, Afghanistan/Mujahideen, Iran-Iraq war, Granada, Tiananmen, the fall of the Wall/Soviet Army, the Gulf War, Rwanda, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, 9/11, the 2nd Gulf War, the war on terror, the surge, Donbas, the rise & stabilization of ISIS... we now have nothing of a foreign army likely to fight, and aside from tiny terrorist disturbances, little to disrupt our lives. Knock on wood.

One of Rubio's "allies" just noted that he just panics when the pressure's on. Which is kind of bass-ackwards in so many ways. Sure, it disqualifies him for President, and for the Republicans, sure, they're a dying cause even though they've cornered the electorate. But for me, I'm feeling fine. We could be going forward faster, but at least we're going forward. I've noted with my Millennial kids they've little tolerance for slow action, a bit of attention deficit syndrome. Perhaps that's part of the core of this current election, the debate not over how big a loaf, but how fast it's rising.