Baby Boomers Get Own Lobbying Firm; Gen X Asks "What More Do They Want?"

Baby Boomers already dominate mass media and politics, but now they're really serious: they have their own lobbyists in Washington, DC:

Public relations biggie Fleishman-Hillard Inc. has launched what it calls FH Boom, a practice that targets baby boomers, those folks roughly between 42 and 60 years old. The demographic is about 78 million people.

The practice is heavy on commercial marketing and public relations, but FH Boom also figures to advise public affairs clients on coalitions and advocacy issues involving baby boomers. Think legislative and administration issues dealing with taxes, health care, Medicare costs, Social Security and college costs.

- Judy Sarasohn, Washington Post

Gen X, the generation whose fate is to be forever stuck behind the postwar generation, must wonder what else they have to put up with. When they started to turn 40, all eyes were on the first Boomers turning 60. Boomers run the country and block Gen Xer's way to the top of organizations; demand that Gen X and Gen Y pay for Boomers' fully funded Social Security benefits, and crowd out music from this millennium with concert tours by bands from the 1970s.

Now the Boomer generation need a DC lobbying firm? So that The Graduate can become the official film of the United States? So that a monument to the first Chrysler minivan is erected on the National Mall in Washington? So that Viagra prescriptions and plastic surgery are covered by Medicare?

Forget red states versus blue states -- perhaps the new political divide will be between Boomers and every other generation. As Mark Anthony said in Julius Caesar, "Cry havoc, and let slip ... the lobbyists?"