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When Hillary Clinton scolded Barack Obama the other
day in Iowa, talking about his inexperience and listing his mistakes, I saw
a picture of a mother lecturing her grown son. That may not be fair,
because Clinton is only 14 years older than Obama, but she is of a
different generation. In his first book, Obama tells how he reacted when
his mother got on his case. He flashed her “a reassuring smile and
patted her hand and told her not to worry” — which is just the
way he reacts to Clinton. Clinton and I are hardcore baby boomers; Obama is
not. (Technically his 1961 birthdate may make him a late boomer, but he
doesn’t act or think like one.) I’m just beginning to realize,
more slowly than the younger folks, how much that difference matters. A lot
has been written lately about the baby boom generation because of the
publication of Tom Brokaw’s new book, Boom!
Voices of the Sixties, and Newsweek recently devoted an issue
to “1968: The Year That Made Us Who We Are.” I clearly remember
all the tumultuous events of that year, beginning with anti-war candidate
Eugene McCarthy’s remarkable second-place finish in the New Hampshire
primary against LBJ, then Bobby Kennedy’s entrance into the
presidential race. I remember where I was on March 31 when Johnson
announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term. The next morning,
the woman cleaning my freshman dorm told me, with a mix of concern and
glee, “We don’t got no president! He quit!” That very
week, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis, and this was followed by
race riots in Chicago. In June I was studying for finals when I got the
news that Bobby Kennedy had been killed.
We who were aware and involved were seared by those
events in a way that youngsters like Obama, 7 years old in 1968, could
never be. To us, everything mattered more. Discussions turned into
arguments with life-and-death urgency. This intensity molded political
debate over the next four decades. Sides were taken, lines hardened; the
debate became shrill. Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Atlantic, calls this “the
debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation
that has long engulfed all of us.”
Enter Obama, who won’t get caught up in whether
Iraq is “another Vietnam” but, as the clear anti-war candidate,
will get out as quickly as is feasible. He just doesn’t see a problem
with many of our old problems. As the only black candidate, he has kept the
volume low on the race issue, distancing himself from Clinton’s old
friends in the civil-rights movement, while assuring both blacks and whites
that he’ll do the right thing quietly. Other Democrats seem fake when
they jump on the religion bandwagon with a story of personal faith, but
Obama, who came to religion as an adult, says that his new faith is rooted
in the secular world and comes with doubts like yours and mine. Sullivan
argues that the Obama candidacy “is about ending a war . . . the war
within America that has prevailed since Vietnam . . . a
nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world
needs it most.”
We boomers won’t discount our experience and
our dedication to the causes of peace and justice — but if somebody
with less baggage can get the same job done sooner, by calming fears and
forming new coalitions, then I say give him a chance. Those of us who
remember John F. Kennedy may be the only ones left who know what it means
when excitement comes to politics. We boomers wouldn’t deny
youngsters this chance, through Obama, to join their hopes with a fresh
face, and style.
Contact Fletcher Farrar at
ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2007.
