Our leftist children
Rob Price

A new poll conducted by three major news media claims young people - children aged 17 to 29 - are leaning politically more to the left than the general public.

More young Americans, according to the poll, favor a national health care program. They support looser immigration laws. A majority of the age group even says it intends to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008.

The organizations that coordinated the poll are The New York Times, CBS News and MTV. Conservative residents of The Southern Tier may suspect the yellow dog media of shaping the poll to conform with its own liberal bias. On the other hand, I am ready to swear with total confidence the poll is accurate. In fact, I wonder how much the three news companies spent on their research. I myself could have told them the same thing, and I wouldn't have charged them as much.

How do I know young people are more liberal than, say, their parents? Because I am the father of an 18-yearold whose leftist views took form shortly after she could talk. Beginning in her earliest years, I tried to make The Wall Street Journal's editorial page part of her daily reading. But she has never appreciated the glories of the free market and would rather tell me unregulated economies contribute to global warming.

What can you do with a child like this? Well, my wife and I had the great idea of graduating her from high school and packing her off to college. Sure enough, one local school district obliged our wishes and last weekend gave her a high school diploma.

It was a beautiful weekend for a high school graduation. The muggy weather of the previous week had moved on, and the heat and humidity of the last few days were yet to come. A natural pocket of pleasant weather appeared out of the blue, as it were, and made itself available for everyone's graduation parties, including the party that my wife and I began planning about 15 years ago.

Relatives traveled from Chicago, Washington and Chambersburg, Pa. My father - a man genetically hardwired to pay for everyone's drinks - arrived bearing cases of wine and spirits. My wife meanwhile supervised the appetizers and soft drinks for the anywhere-from-five-to-50 high school friends our daughter had invited over. Then I fired up my newest Serious Acquisition - a Brinkman grill and barbecue pit measuring NEARLY SIX FEET LONG - and cooked approximately 375 hamburgers. Size, I have decided, does matter.

The next day we all drove to our daughter's school and sat in the school gymnasium for the actual big event. The really weird thing was, the interior temperature started out in the pleasant mid-70s, then rose into the high 90s sometime during the superintendent's welcoming remarks. But it was a nice ceremony nonetheless, and we enjoyed applauding our daughter and her classmates, all the time marvelling that Phase One of the plan we'd hatched years ago was actually coming together. We had raised a high school graduate!

Phase 2 begins in less than two months, when our daughter is supposed to report for her freshman year and a three-week course called "Workshop in Language and Thinking."

I'm not sure what this workshop is all about, and I'm certain my daughter isn't going to tell me anything substantive about it. In fact, I don't expect to hear anything substantive from my daughter for the next four years. This will be consistent with our conversations regarding high school, every single one of which went like this:

Mother and Father: How was school today?

Daughter: Mmmmmm.

Mother and Father: What did you do?

Daughter: Mmmmmm. Mother and Father: What? Daughter: Nothing. Mother and Father: What? Nothing?

Daughter: Mmmmmmm.

But I wouldn't be surprised if this so-called Workshop in Language and Thinking has something to do with the New York Times/CBS News/NTV poll that detects a decidely leftist bent among our nation's youth. My wife and I visited her college campus earlier this year, and I didn't see any signs advertising the next meeting of college Republicans. In fact, the only reference to Republicans I saw was a bumper sticker that said "Republicans for Voldemort."

I liked it. I think Lord Voldemort has some good ideas, if we'd only listen. I bet he also reads the Wall Street Journal editorial page.