Message to millennials: Bernie Sanders is intellectually consistent not intellectually honest.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

I recently got an email from a young man I dearly love, a college freshman who's a close friend of my son's. This being the first election of his lifetime in which he can vote, he was researching the issues and candidates in the Democratic primary and asked for my views. I sent him an email back that was probably way longer than he was looking for. But the exercise forced me to articulate my own thinking about the stakes in this primary. So I thought I'd share an edited version of my email to that young man.

A key fact of this race is that Democratic voters my age lean toward Hillary Clinton, while voters your age overwhelmingly support Bernie Sanders. One of the reasons this is such a big deal is that there are a lot of voters your age right now--the Millennials, your generation, are the biggest birth cohort since the Baby Boom, my generation.

It's not surprising that younger voters are, by and large, with Bernie, and passionately so. Young people almost always support the candidate who most forcefully expresses their ideals. In 1972, when many Baby Boomers were the age Millennials are now, they went overwhelmingly for George McGovern--who campaigned on ending Vietnam, cutting the defense budget, and other liberal causes--over more moderate candidates like Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. In fact, Bill and Hillary Clinton worked for the McGovern campaign in Texas.

McGovern lost forty-nine states to Richard Nixon.

A big part of Bernie's appeal is his "authenticity." He wears rumpled suits, lets his hair run wild, and scowls rather than plaster a fake politician's smile on his face. That's something I love about him, too--though as one of my favorite Millennial writers, the Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, notes, no woman in politics could get away with that.

Another appealing factor about Bernie is that he's intellectually consistent. He has a big, overarching, simple-to-grasp vision of what's wrong with the country and how to fix it: the billionaire class is screwing it up for the rest of us, so let's trim their political power by reforming campaign finance laws and tax them more to finance government programs that give average people a better life. It's a vision he's maintained for decades, there's always been a lot of truth in it, and that truth is more apparent today than ever.

But intellectual consistency isn't the same as intellectual honesty. He's surely got way more of the latter than the buffoons running for president in the GOP...