Hunter S. Thompson Books

This is an excerpt from RS 101 “Fear & Loathing in Washington by Hunter S. Thompson, subtitled “The Million Pound Shithammer”

  “…These are the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 – going, maybe, to the polls for the first time – who supposedly hold the fate of the nation in the palms of their eager young hands.  According to the people who claim to speak for it, this “youth vote” has the power to zap Nixon out of office with a flick of its wrist.  Hubert Humphrey lost in ’68 by 499,704 votes – a minuscule percentage of what the so-called “youth vote” could turn out in 1972.

But there are not many people in Washington who take this notion of the “youth vote” very seriously.  Not even the candidates.  The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in ’72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) voters means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns…just another big wave of new immigrants who don’t know the score yet, but who will learn is soon enough, so why worry? Why indeed?  The scumbags behind this thinking are probably right, once again – but it might be worth pondering, this time, if perhaps they might be right for the wrong reasons.  Almost all the politicans and press wizards who denigrate the “so-called youth vote” as a factor in the ’72 elections have justified their thinking with a sort of melancholy judgement on “the kids” themselves. “How many will even register?” they ask.  “And even then – even assuming a third of the possibles might register, how many of those will actually get out and vote?”

The implication, every time, is that the “youth vote” menace is just a noisy paper tiger.  Sure, some of these kids will vote, they say, but the way things look now, it won’t be more than ten percent.  That’s the colleges; the other ninety percent are either military types, on the dole, or working people – on salary, just married, hired into their first jobs.  Man, these people are already locked down, the same as their parents.
That’s the argument…and it’s probably safe to say, right now, that there is not a single presidential candidate, media guru or backstairs politics wizard in Washington who honestly believes the “youth vote’ will have more than a marginal, splinter-vote effect on the final outcome of the 1972 presidential campaign.
These kids are turned off from politics, they say.  Most of ‘em don’t want to hear about it.  All they want to do these days is lie around on water beds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna…yeah, and just between you and me, Fred, I think it’s probably all for the best…”