Romney surrogate's youth vote pitch: Mitt is younger than John McCain

"Hey, I'm younger than McCain too.
Maybe I should have run." Uh:

'My guess is you'll see a dramatic difference in the youth vote this time ' part of it is you have a younger, more dynamic Republican candidate,' Hank Brown, 72, a retired senator and former Colorado University president, said on a Romney campaign conference call. 'Whether it's entitlement reform or a youthful candidate or the potential of jobs, you're going to have many different factors at work with regard to young people.'

You have to be smoking something pretty strong to believe the fact that Mitt Romney is 65 will make him more appealing to young voters than John McCain was in 2008, when he was 72. And the issue isn't his age: It's his policies.

Take, for example, health care reform. Thanks to Obamacare, under current law young adults can stay on their family's insurance plan through the age of 26. Mitt Romney would repeal that. Also thanks to Obamacare, insurance must cover birth control as a preventive medicine, which Romney declares an affront to religious liberty. Romney's embrace of conservative social positions on abortion and gay rights aren't helping him either. And while he now shares President Obama's support for lower interest rates on student loans, throughout the campaign he's bought into the conservative fantasy that education policy should treat colleges and universities like widgets you can buy at the corner store.

If Mitt Romney is going to win the youth vote, he needs to not only make young voters ignore all that, but also to convince them that doubling down on George W. Bush's trickle-down economics is the best path for America. And that's not going to happen.