Is Obama vs Clinton Really A Generational Battle?

The Boston Globe's Peter Canellos thinks that first-black vs first-woman isn't the most important element of the Barack Obama vs Hillary Clinton race. Instead, he says, we should look at them as representing two different generations. While Obama, born in 1961, is technically a Baby Boomer ...

He was 8 and living in Indonesia at the time of Woodstock. He didn't have a chance to avoid the Vietnam draft, since it ended when he was 11.

... (the '60s) probably seemed like a slide show of passing images, from King to LBJ to Dylan to Fonda to Angela Davis, wrapping up somewhere in the early '70s, around the time of Patty Hearst.

... his cultural guideposts are markedly different from the two older baby boomers to have occupied the office, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. ... Obama, who is 15 years younger than both Bush and Clinton, had the '60s in the rearview mirror during his formative years. He grew up in the aftermath of the huge cultural storm, not the middle. He saw a country engaged in the far less dramatic, but perhaps equally significant, endeavor of assimilating social changes.

Canellos thinks that the difference between Clinton and Obama are best seen through the prism of what they saw in their teen and young adult years. Clinton, born in 1947, experienced the conflicts of the 1960s firsthand: the women's movement, Vietnam, minority rights, and the cultural war against the values of the World War II generation. Obama, born 14 years later, dealt with the reverberations of those battles:

... much of what's striking about his campaign -- such as its emphasis on finding common values among a diverse population -- can be better read in generational, rather than racial, terms. His formative years -- the '70s and '80s -- were times when people strongly identified with their own group, from professional women to military families and churchgoing whites. The years since then have seen a slow blurring of the lines, even as identity politics continues to have a powerful influence.

Canellos is on to something. Someone who started college in 1965 had a far different life experience than someone who was a freshman in 1979. By 1979, the '60s were actual history: enshrined in movies (see Animal House and The Deer Hunter) and oldies radio. The late Boomers have always gotten a raw deal: the leadig edge got Woodstock and the sexual revolution while their younger siblings ended up with ... pretentious art rock and sexually transmitted diseases. The '60s were such a dynamic time that anyone who experienced them as a teenager or young adult really is a different generation than those who came of age later -- no matter what the demographers say.

Canellos missed another argument that extends his point: is Obama is the first presidential candidate from Gen X? That generation is, after all, supposed to be more pragmatic and flexible than its predecessor -- labels which seem to adhere better to Obama than Clinton. And Gen Xers often feel they've spent their whole lives living in the mess the Boomers created ... something that a President Obama, coming after Boomers Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, may get to do yet again.

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