Obama’s politics: he’s not a boomer
[Even though he is a boomer by the pre-Neil Howe definition - yeah
war, race, sex, all that shit’s so old-fashioned - can he really be
this shallow?]
New York Times - January 21, 2007
Shushing the Baby Boomers
By JOHN M. BRODER
THE time has come, Senator Barack Obama says, for the baby boomers to
get over themselves.
In taking the first steps toward a presidential candidacy last week,
Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961 and considers himself a member of the
post-boomer generation, said Americans hungered for “a different kind
of politics,” one that moved beyond the tired ideological battles of
the 1960s.
To make his point, Mr. Obama, a Democrat from Illinois in his first
term in the Senate, announced the formation of his presidential
exploratory committee in a video streamed on his Web site. He is
tieless and relaxed and oh so cool.
Mr. Obama calculates that Americans of all ages are sick of the
feuding boomers and ready to turn to the generation that came of age
after Vietnam, after the campus culture wars between freaks and
straights, and after young people had given up on what überboomer
Hillary Rodham Clinton (who made her own announcement on the Web
yesterday) called in a 1969 commencement address a search for “a more
immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.”
In his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama is critical of
the style and the politics of the 60s, when the psyches of most of
his potential rivals for the White House were formed. He writes that
the politics of that era were highly personal, burrowing into every
interaction between youth and authority and among peers. The battles
moved to Washington in the 1990s and endure today, he says.
“In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the
elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I
were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale
rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of
college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
Mr. Obama says he recognizes that the flashpoints of the 60s — war,
racism, inequality, the relations between the sexes — still animate
American politics and society and remain largely unresolved. And he
acknowledges, as a child of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan
father, that his own prominence and prospects would have been
impossible without the struggles of those who marched in Selma and
Washington. But he argues that America faces new challenges that
require a new political paradigm.
Mr. Obama may be on to something. Surveys — and the stock market —
show that the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both
36, are among the most admired entrepreneurs in America. And no less
an establishment institution than the Ford Foundation has indicated
that it will look for a leader in his or her 40’s when Susan V.
Berresford, the foundation’s president since 1996, retires next year
at age 65.
Plenty of self-loathing boomers agree that their cohort ought to take
a “Big Chill” pill and head for that vegan commune in Oregon they
have dreamed of. “We baby boomers have been dreadful in the public
arena,” the Time columnist Joe Klein wrote in a blog last week.
On the other hand, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page recruited a tech-industry
veteran, Eric E. Schmidt, born in 1955, to run Google’s day-to-day
business while they come up with ways to make their brainchild pay.
And despite the supposed hunger for a new generation of leaders,
voters recently elected what is probably the oldest Congress in
American history, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The question most Americans are asking, said Paul B. Costello, 54,
who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Michael
Dukakis and Walter Mondale, is not “When were you born?” but “What
have you got?”
Mr. Costello, director of communications at Stanford’s medical
school, said: “I look at these two candidates, Hillary is the star
student and Obama is a transfer student and everyone’s saying, ‘Who’s
that guy? Oh, cool, wow.’ But yet nobody knows much about him and
everybody knows Hillary’s going to be the valedictorian.” He added:
“I don’t know that voters really care about these issues of the baby
boomers versus Generation X. It’s a nice sort of branding, a
marketing thing when you’re trying to create yourself from nothing.”
Modern presidential campaigns are essentially character tests, and
for 20 years or longer the cultural and political divides of the 60s
served as presumed signposts to a candidate’s character. Did he
protest the war, trip to Hendrix, march in solidarity with women? Or
enroll in R.O.T.C., rush a fraternity, join a church? As a young man,
Mr. Obama did not have to make many of those choices, and he now has
an opportunity to define himself on his own terms and not be
instantly caricatured based on personal decisions he made four
decades ago. (He has, of course, acknowledged some marijuana and
cocaine use in his youth; that does not seem to have dimmed his
prospects.)
“Where you were on these issues really told people who you were,”
said Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House official who is now a
political consultant in California. “But 2008 will represent a hinge
moment in generational politics, not just because of the prominence
of a post-boomer candidate but because this will be the first cycle
when a whole new range of issues as big, if not bigger, than the big
issues that defined the boomers will be front and center: Iraq, the
war on terror, global warming, energy, technology and globalization.”
While the Obama-Clinton generational dynamic will mostly play out in
the primaries, Republican voters will be weighing the candidacy of
one of the oldest men ever to seek the presidency, John McCain, 70,
the only member of the likely field born before the baby boom’s
unofficial start in 1943. (There is disagreement over what birth
years define the baby boom; some say 1946 to 1964, but the
sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss consider the boomer bulge
to have begun in 1943 and ended in 1960.)
John F. Kennedy noted in his Inaugural Address in 1961 that a torch
had passed to a new generation of Americans, “born in this century,
tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Kennedy’s
cohort, known as the G. I. Generation and born between 1901 and 1924,
occupied the White House continuously until Bill Clinton wrested it
from George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992. Mr. Clinton turned it over
to another boomer, George W. Bush.
BUT some say that after 14 years of personal and political self-
indulgence in Washington and a grinding war, it’s time to say goodbye
to the solipsistic generation.
“Thank you, here’s your gold watch, it’s time for the personal style
and political framework of the 1960’s to get out of the way,” said
Eric Liu, 38, a speechwriter and policy aide in the Clinton White
House who now runs a mentoring program in Seattle.
And yet Mr. Obama has not demonstrated his leadership beyond eight
years in the Illinois Senate and two in Washington. His early
opposition to the Iraq war has pleased many Democratic voters, but it
is not wholly clear how he would manage an end to the war and deal
with global terrorism and other foreign policy challenges.
The historian and Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said Mr.
Obama had to offer more than a repudiation of the previous
generation’s actions. “It depends on what the policies are,” Mr.
Schlesinger said. “The New Frontier was the development of the
insights of the New Deal.”
Todd Harris, 35, a Republican political consultant, said he worked in
1999 for the short-lived presidential campaign of Representative John
Kasich of Ohio, who was born in 1952. “He was young and new and fresh
and we listened to the same music,” Mr. Harris said. “But I’m not
sure that works when your country is at war. I think that most people
I know in my generation will place a far greater premium on someone’s
leadership skills and their ability to guide the nation through
turbulent times than they do on what generation that politician came
from or what that person recently downloaded from iTunes.”
Mr. Obama would be foolish to run solely as the anti-boomer, Mr.
Lehane said, if for no other reason than that the baby boomers are
the largest generation in American history, and they vote.