Still More on the Generational Thing

From The New York Times Magazine.

Win or lose, Obama represents the next generational incursion. He is, by definition, a late boomer, having made the cutoff by about three years, but temperamentally he belongs to what the writer Douglas Coupland branded Generation X, the first wave of Americans to come of age politically after Watergate. He was 6 when Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; 14 when “Saturday Night Live” first came on the air; 19 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. For those of us Obama’s age and younger, the formative events of the 1960s, the enmities and shared experiences that defined the next 40 years of American politics, are as much a part of history as the Treaty of Versailles; we weren’t shaped by this constant sense of political Armageddon. (Perhaps this is the underlying reason that Obama’s recent comments about Reagan as a transformational president — comments similar to those once made by Bill Clinton himself — proved so easily exploited by the Clinton camp; Obama wasn’t around, politically, for that era, and this lack of shared experience very likely bothers a lot of older Democrats more than his lack of actual governing experience.)…

None of us know where politics is headed after this campaign, as one American moment passes and another begins. John Kennedy ushered in the generation of American leaders born after 1900, and his short presidency made possible a prolonged progressive era and, ultimately, the Reaganesque reaction to it. Gary Hart imploded, but his generational rebellion against liberal orthodoxy and his embrace of a modern economy — Hart and his brethren were known as the “Atari Democrats” — led directly to Clintonism. Similarly, even should Obama fail, he will be followed by reinforcements in both parties, an invading army of Gen-Xers who grew up amid the bitterness and polarity of boomer politics but who never quite understood why. It may take four years, or another four after that, but the door is now ajar. And history tells you that all the delegates in the world — super or not — won’t be able to slam it shut.