Sorry if I wasn't clear, but this isn't about the relative liberalism of voters, but of generations of politicians and political operatives generally.

I'm a late late boomer, and I sort of agree with this characterization. Maybe boomer Democrats have been traumatized by the 90s, but (and this will sound as if I'm blaming the victim) whose fault is that?

No one could have anticipated the vitriol and energy of the right? Sort of like our current administration couldn't have anticipated the chaos in Iraq or the destruction of Katrina. Call it traumatization, if you must, but to me it just seems incompetence more than anything else. I still see it happening right now, with the weak response to President Bush's veto threats. It's not fear, it's incompetence. Or maybe it's incompetence because of fear. Whatever. It's demoralizaing. Markos' (and Americablog, and Firedoglake and Atrios) fight against Billo is deeply refreshing. Maybe it is a generational thing. Thank heavens for the kids, then.

J. McCutchen

Damn you yunguns

I am a BOOMER..1952. I voted reluctantly for McGovern, came clean for Gene before I could vote

Why are you whippersnappers compelled to caricature my generation

Too hell with all of you

I'm off to Camp Obama West in August

You got it exactly correct Golis. Thanks.

And I hear that very same argument in the threads here day after day.

Exactly. Mitt Romney called Hillary Clinton a socialist. Hillary Clinton! The woman on the cover of Fortune Magazine that week. A communist. And yet we're told we better not nominate a lefty or they'll call them names.

If we nominated Augusto Pinochet himself, the right wingers would still call him a dirty commie.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

When people hop on the 'Elective Office is My Vocation' train, if they're lucky, they get on the fast track to higher office. During their rise in the politcal world any ideals they had in the beginning start to lose ground to the desire to get re elected. By the time this person gets to the Big Leagues, a seat in the House or Senate, getting re elected becomes their raison d'etre.

During the 90s a member of Congress could score cheap political points by getting up in the Senate or House and making grand speeches condemning Saddam or other despots throughout the world. Babbling on about WMD and the evil Saddam was a win win during the 90s.

Hillary and many others in the Dem party cast a vote to go to war in Iraq, it was a political cover your ass vote with probably little thought to the consequences our troops would pay. I'd guess the only consequences they gave serious thought to was about how a 'NO' vote would have played in the next election.

The babbling speeches during the 90s, the vote for war have all come back to haunt them. Sadly, most, if not all, have yet to pay for them in any substantive way.

Its these political cover your ass votes that may be the most egregious, and our troops are paying the price for them.

When people hop on the 'Elective Office is My Vocation' train, if they're lucky, they get on the fast track to higher office. During their rise in the politcal world any ideals they had in the beginning start to lose ground to the desire to get re elected. By the time this person gets to the Big Leagues, a seat in the House or Senate, getting re elected becomes their raison d'etre.

Yes! Which is why youth leads change. We do not need an experienced politician if we want change. Experience means experienced in the ways of Washington, which means graft, corruption, lobbying and corporate interests. We need a leader who has not sold himself to the highest bidder to get votes.

Hillary is a Boomer, George Bush is a Boomer.

So, my Boomer is less evil than your Boomer?

"Boomers"...heh.

When your children's future is no brighter than your own the present is more dangerous than the future.

lol

I choose judgment over experience. Boomers had their day. Time to turn the page.

Isn't Obama a Boomer, too?

(Ugh. For some reason, the "Wouldn't you like to be a pepper, too?" line from Dr. Pepper is now running through what passes for my brain...")

Activists have developed an anger and energy that's been necessary to defend progressive values and the broader shared values of the country in the face of dishonest and disturbing overreach. Will we be able to leave that political stance and mentality behind for one that will suit us in the next era?

Andrew, aren't you basically saying here that, paraphasing, we're all just angry bloggers?

No one, I think, is angry for the sake of being angry. People are angry because torture is being committed in our name, the Constitution's been pissed on, etc, etc, etc.

When Bush and Cheney and the rest of the cabal are out of office, the anger will subside.

Or, maybe not. To put it another way -- start showing us some honest Republicans, and we'll start putting down some of this anger.

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

I think that a misreading of my point.

Activists have developed an anger and energy that's been necessary to defend progressive values and the broader shared values of the country in the face of dishonest and disturbing overreach.

What I am saying, is that the age of Bush is coming to an end. There is not political support for Bushism (a bizarre combination of corporatism, warmongering and Christian fundamentalism). Obviously each of the GOP candidates is trying to reconstruct it in certain ways, but the GOP has lost faith with independents and will need to work to maintain their coalition, not assume its existence.

As a result, it would be silly for us to continue fighting Bushism, and maintain the defensive and angry stance that has allowed us to at least put significant pressure on it, after it's gone.

What will be necessary in the future is not a defensive stance, but an offensive one based on recreating the country and its political alliances based on bringing dignity and happiness to Americans and others in the world.

Let me be plain. Generational politics was stupid back then, "Never trust anybody over 30!" was a slogan invented by someone who became an ad man and stock hustler and died jaywalking. There were lots of people over and under 30 who were trustworthy, and lots who weren't. The generation is irrelevant, and anybody who thinks they're protected by their youthfulness is just looking for a new trauma.

Get your mind on what you want to accomplish, and then take the political means to accomplish it. Forget age.

Plying the neo from the con would be a good start. True conservation is an attractive attribute.

I think you should probably trash the boomer vs. younger label...In answer to my own question above, Obama qualifies as a boomer:

"Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. "

I don't think it's an age thing, either, because Howard Dean managed to excite a lot of people. It's an attitude, and mj rosenberg captured it perfectly. To the D.C. establishment: you're a joke, we know it, and you know it, too.

WRB: "John what do you mean when you say older women?" Well, no, of course I don't mean older than Clinton herself. I mean that her favorables among women drop as we get into the 50+ bracket, which is more likely to have concerns for her caution or compromising.

And Andrew and MJR, I'll stick to my guns. I see no reason to think that Obama is more daring than Clinton because he's younger. He's more daring than Clinton because any recent candidate for the nomination is short of Lieberman. Obama may even the one after Clinton in the last 20 years who has most packaged himself as post ideological. Ok, I realize all the commenters loved this post, but I think it's wrong.

Oh, and MJR's previous post, while he weighs in here with Andrew to great acclaim, was on Obama the great compromiser. Look, I'm as receptive to Obama as the next guy, and I know that emotions matter in politics, but this has devolved into a big wet kiss. My family has a nice briard when we need that.  

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

GW never "boomed" he just fizzled.

I'm 47, so am of the Obama generation, and I think there is a lot of truth in this assessment. Although demographers would officially classify me as a late boomer, I have always felt a huge gap between my age group (graduated high school in '77) and the "sixties generation". For one thing, I belonged to that very brief generation that never even had to register for Selective Service.

I tend to see people like Bill and Hillary Clinton as part of a generation of politicians who were radicalized in their youth, and formed their core identities in that context, but who have had to rework their public personnas in a dramatic way to achieve viability with the broader national political culture. Frankly, they seem inherently phony and dishonest to me, with divided souls. No matter how many admirable things Bill Clinton did in his presidency, and there were many, I couldn't get over the feeling that he was a fake. And with HRC, the feeling is even more palpable.

I'm not sure I agree that this is because of the "trauma" that generation went through. People who lived through the depression and WWII must have experienced worse traumas, for example. Instead I think it has something to do with the fact that sixties-era, white, college educated young people were able through their shear numbers, and illusions of easy, perpetual prosperity, to respond to their own particular traumas by breaking away from the majority culture to form a separate "counterculture". They were uniquely successful in avoiding many of the usual channels of socialization in which the traumatic challenges to security and identity that every generation of young people experiences are negotiated in late adolescence and early adulthood through a combination of compromise, accommodation, generational transmission of values and rites of passage, and resignation in the face of the brutal enforcement of social norms.

Many sixties boomers created a separate peer counterculture, and formed their adult identities in that culture. Sadly, it turned out that the core attitudes of that culture were both minority attitudes in the country, and inherently youthful, and its members found themselves to be aliens in their own country as they got older. Since the identity formation was too deep to be shaken off, the only alternative was either to accept a separation between private and public personna, or else to find a way to live in communities in which the old counterculture values were retained or modified only slightly.

Given the second option, I don't at all apply the "phoniness" judgment to all people in the same generation. Boomers who have gone on to be activists, or just ordinary people in reasonably supportive communities, have been able to preserve much of their youthful outlook, and make a graceful transition into a slightly less radical, but still healthily liberal middle age. They generally seem very authentic and real to me.

I do have my doubts that a movement and energy based solely on one thing will easily pivot to another, yes. I mean, the netroots and the energy on the left is fundamentally based on anti-Bushism (thank God!). What happens after Bush?

Although demographers would officially classify me as a late boomer, I have always felt a huge gap between my age group (graduated high school in '77) and the "sixties generation".

Nailed it. I agree. The "boomer" designation has never felt right to me. People born in the early 60s faced quite a different world (here in the States) than those born say in 1947 to 1954. I have never considered myself as "part of the 60s"--rather, I watched as stuff happened to those around as a result of the 60s.

I think Bill is a phony, and I think Hillary is a phony, as well. I don't know why they are--most politicians seem phony to me, regardless of what generation they come from.

Interesting post.

No, I think it's pretty funny.

Andrew Sullivan doesn't know what Hillary Clinton is thinking or feeling, and I think that his characterization of her as a "self-hating liberal" and "full of self-doubt" is a projection, not an accurate portrayal of someone who has the guts or the ego to run for president.

This is the guy who brought you "The Bell Curve" and Bush and the Iraq war, and you rely on him for astute character assessment? Andrew Sullivan has been wrong about every single issue since 1992, and why anyone would expect him to be right, now, astonishes me.

Excellent... I was smiling to myself by the time I finished reading this.

Having been born in 1969 myself I consider myself in that no mans land between the boomers and that cleverly marketed Gen X (TM). And while I do not think that I am typical of any particular group I have to tell you that I not only identify with John Stewart (a lot) but I have to say that I would seriously consider pulling the handle for him if he were running for office! And think about this,

I also think Andrew is pretty much spot on in pointing out the apparent difference in generations. I personally think that it is there and perceptible but it also got me thinking - is there a comparable break within the Republican party? And if so, is that represented by the recent neo-conservative movement or in some other manner?

The quote sounds like a product of a highly bored non-creative and insecure person. Why pay attention to this nonsense is beyond me.

As a baby boomer who is an orthodox Cesar Chavez Democrat, fear of Republicans in not on my menu nor do I believe is it on anyone else's.

I propose to use the blog real estate more effectively.

It really drives me insane.

Maybe you ought to take a little vacation, Andrew.  When you've exhausted everything else you can think of and decide it's time for a little boomer bashing, well, I guess the young just don't have the energy or endurance they should.  Maybe a brown rice, macro diet would help.  I'm concerned for you.

I've lived through Bay of Pigs, the Nikita Khrushchev-Kennedy missile crisis (we all went around saying goodbye to our friends and reconciling with our enemies over that one), the Kennedy Assassination, the King Assassination, the other Kennedy Assassination, Vietnam, Stonewall, and a host of other "interesting" occurrences.  I was in Cleveland during Kent State, observing curfews imposed, having to return home from visiting friends before 9:00 p.m. or risk having to say overnight.  I've had black friends assaulted in Little Italy because my school sat between two ghettos.

I am NOT terrorized.  The kind of parlor psychologizing you find "extremely important" I find insignificant bloviating.  I am not a DLC type, I've never been a DLC type, and frankly, I'm tired of persons telling me who I am, how I behave, and how inferior it is to younger persons who have greater insight and ability to prophecy what is necessary  over the next few years.

And please don't complain about textbook ad hominem when you're guilty of ad homineming an entire generation.

aMike

(now I'll put away my anger, thank you very much)

(DOB 1943) I was working on a comment here when I read Max Sawecky's latest post "Let us not reason together." I would like to let it stand as my reaction to this distraction about generations. Mr. Sawecky describes what was the fundamental political challenge I faced in my youth and what is the fundamental political challenge that I along with younger citizens face today. Fear, alienation and pessimism are all appropriate reactions to this circumstance. What separates people's politics is not age but rather how they respond to this challenge.

In many ways, Bushism will continue if a Republican is elected Prez in 08. Certainly the foreign policy, fight em there so we don't have to fight em here aspect of it. So maybe it won't go away so easy, or at least aspects of it won't. 

After Bush, like I said, I think Edwards is laying some of that out. I think a real key to a Democratic vision can be created around universal healthcare, and the idea of valuing each other, instead of the corporate dollar. Energy independence, better security at home, making the world green -- these are all things we can fight for, without being angry people.  

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

Now, if this boomer was angry she'd say that she is going insane because generation X and Y won't get off their Ipods and Iphones long enough to fight for something, anything. If they did, maybe they'd be able to help us drive a political party to stand for something again.

Jon Stewart was born in 1962, so by your own definition, he is a late boomer, not a post-boomer.

If I could give you five 5s, I would, aMike.  You have captured my sentiments exactly.   I don't know about you, but far from becoming more cautious over the years, the continued assaults from the right have pushed me leftward and made me more strident.

(Boy, am I going to get flamed!)

Part of the reality of being a Boomer is knowing that you are going to be denounced by the generations on either side of you, no matter what you do or say, and only because of the particular date range in which you happened to be born.  In a sense, there is a certain liberation in that knowledge.  If you're going to get grief no matter what you do, then you might as well follow your heart.

Boomers are not all one monolithic group, but try getting any non-Boomer to accept that. 

Jon Stewart may have been a late boomer, but I think he's filled in nicely!

*I'm sorry, I counldn't help myself...

You can't understand boomers without placing them in context as the children of the "greatest generation". That generation came of age in the '40s to fight the "good war" and didn't leave the stage till 1992, no not even then -- they're still erecting memorials to them and their war.

We inherited the bad war and the over commitments that their generation made in the glory and power of the postwar boom. We still haven't figured out how to get out of their shadow and set a new course.

Maybe we can't, but the younger folk are going to have to get a grip too and figure out that nuance isn't going to cut it. You are going to have to rise to take on the mantle of major change for you may not have the luxury of escaping "interesting times".

You can see the problems here in both Clinton and Obama. Clintonism did not set a new course for the post WWII world. If they had, it wouldn't have been so easy for the neocons to hijack foreign policy and for Hillary to vote them the power to do it. Obama figures he can get by with a compromise here and a compromise there - well that may not be nearly enough either. What we don't see from either generation is a real vision for the 21st century.

Oh, them's fighting words, bluebell. I did this once already to JohnW1141 and now I have to do it to you. I'll show you how politically active we can be.

Click here to sign a petition against you!

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I was born in the middle of the baby-boom and I regard Hillary and Obama both as too cautious, too eager to be part of the fake "center" without reference to what's right or where the outside-the-Beltway population really is.

But, you know, it's not about generations. There were a lot of different people doing a lot of different things just in my highschool class, never mind our whole generation.

The real problem is that the best and the brightest of my generation simply didn't run for office. And I don't see much different now, either.

What we're really looking at is a bunch of people who got into politics but weren't really that smart.

AC

Haha, that is a great visual.

I now mysteriously have the line - "Nobody wants a Romney in the box" (or essentially any of the candidates really) running through my mind.

I dream of that anger-free day and I couldn't agree more!

It's funny, I just finished watching the box set of Planet Earth (which I recently purchased) and thought to myself how wonderful it made me feel. It reminded me of the wondrous feeling I used to have as a kid when watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom or cracking open a detailed book on dinosaurs and fossils (pre that tragedy called Jurassic Park). The feeling was that the world was this vast and wondrous place waiting to be explored and for new things to be discovered and learned.

Unfortunately somewhere in the 80's and 90's that feeling was slowly replaced with pollution, despots, military misadventures, drug wars, cheap/child labor and all kinds of dark and sinister things. And now since Bush came to office that world went from dark and sinister to downright life threatening. I still lament the fact that I'd be seriously risking my life if I wanted to journey around Egypt or Israel to visit ancient sites. Hell going just about anywhere now has it's risks as an American. And places like Syria, Iraq and Iran are pretty much out of the question. The world became a seeming jail cell called America, full of intolerant and angry people.

Thank you BBC for that wonderful series that, if even for just a moment, help wipe away all of the vile things that have inundated my mind and reminded me how wondrous this planet still is in spite of the negligence, greed and intolerance of that species called homo sapiens.

15 years ago, the invention now known as "the internet" was just about to enter its exponential growth period.

10 years ago, the invention now known as "the web" was exploding nicely, and was used primarily for selling things (I recall other less noble purposes too, but that's another story).

5 years ago, the invention now known as "the blog" was about to do its "hockey stick" thing, and Josh was right there.

Today Josh, Arianna and many others are occupying the space formerly held by the media (pre-consolidation). IMHO, Josh was right on schedule.

A teacher friend of mine has also said that our generation failed the ne(x)t generation. Hving seen the terrible cost of failure, many of us are working overtime to do what we can...

Re: Hell going just about anywhere now has it's risks as an American.

Going just about anywhere has its risks for just about everyone. After all, the vast majority of terrorist victims are NOT Americans, or even Westerners.
As for the portion of your lament that talks about the stuff you watched as a child, it has that classic "When I was a boy..." complaint refrain. Sounds to me that you grew up and became aware that thinsg weren't just hunky-dorey in the world while the world itself didn't really change in any fundamental way (granted the specifics of this and that country changed a lot). I suspect a lot of the anger of the 60s radicals arose from the fact that when they came of age they too discovered a lot of nasty stuff that had been hidden from them when they were children.

I wonder if the polls from 2000 would support my recollection, and that is that Hillary shored up the victory only after Lazio was seen as invading her personal space in one of their debates. Can anyone confirm that, prior to that incident, the outcome of the race was still very much up in the air?

I hear this a lot. But it seems to me that only children and the very young experienced this idealism during the Kennedy era. All the grownups had just gone through the McCarthy era, and two terms of a Republican presidency, with its intense fear and paranoia about nukes and commies. This was the high age of CIA vileness, FBI domestic snooping and oppression, military secrecy, and gangland corruption. You also had a bunch of jaded and depressed alcoholics and pill-poppers trying to forget their wartime horrors. It's hard for me to swallow the picture of the Kennedy assassination as the "end of innocence" for any but a minority of Americans. Most of the rest lost their innocence long before.

I was 22 when Kennedy was assassinated.  It was my first year of graduate school in Cleveland Ohio.  I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news--from a stranger on the street out in front of Severance Hall on the edge of the campus at Western Reserve University.  I went into the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant and sat for a minute...not meditating or anything, just trying to absorb this.  This was something which didn't happen in America (all thought of the assassination of the Mayor of Chicago who may [or many not] have taken a bullet aimed at F.D.R. or the assault on the House of Representatives by Puerto Rican Nationalists passed out of my mind). The former was only history book stuff, and the latter, in 1954, happened when I was 13 and isolated from that sort of thing by an insular adolescence in Minneapolis. 

But Kennedy's assassination was real alright.  I shortly left the church and headed back to the graduate residence, where I and a score of others camped out in front of the television screen, watching it all, and between shots of Dallas and Jackie, the funeral cortège, and John-John saluting the coffin, hearing Cardinal Cushing preside at the Requiem, listening to Walter Cronkite cry on the air and hearing Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings until it was etched on my memory. 

There was idealism, I think.  We embraced the Great Society and Marched for this and that.  I felt old for the first time when I mentioned Kennedy's assassination in a class and a student remarked he hadn't been born yet.

aMike

~ slb said:

Boomers are not all one monolithic group, try getting any non-Boomer to accept that.

"If I was an eagle I'd dress like a duck.... Crawl like a lizard and honk like a truck!" ~Liberty~

~

Get real Andrew:

If o' Sully is, as you opine -- such a smart guy and still offers some very keen insights -- can you please tell us all -- as Bev pointed out -- why he's been wrong about every single issue since 1992?

To many of us in the land of 3D -- Sullivan's like a distant horn on a buoy broken loose from it's mooring in the fog of reality.

~OGD~

Re: But, for you to suggest that the world that we grow up into has not changed in any fundamental way and is somehow the "real world" - it's just not that simple.

I don't think it has changed in the sense that it has gotten more evil. That sounds, weirdly, like the complaint that we get from the Religious Right about how we used to be this Republic of Virtue and became sinful and decadent. Memory, especially chilhood memory, seems to come with rose-tinted glasses. But to look back on the era of your childhood: Richard Nixon? Vietnam? Threat of mass nuclear war? To name just three Big Bads from the 60s. Plus ca change plus la meme chose.

Re: Pollution has been allowed to grow at an increasingly alarming and unchecked rate all over the world.

In the First World at least we've done a pretty good job of cleaning things up. Lake Erie was officially declared dead 40 years ago. But there was a resurrection apparently. And I can recall when the sky over Detroit, seen from a suburban distance, was thick with smog. No longer.

Re: Pollution has been allowed to grow at an increasingly alarming and unchecked rate all over the world.

Much of the Third World's pollution derives from its desperate poverty, not from being rich capitalists. If all those Brazilian peasants slashing and burning the Amazon could live in condos on the beach most of them would.

Re: Then there's our increasingly naive and ham-handed approach to foreign policy.

Oh, I'll agree with you hands down if the only point is the BucCo has been a foreign policy disaster (and a disaster in every other way too). But that ends in Jan 2009, other than cleaning up the messes he has made of course.

Geez Terry...

Apparently by the rating received, your personal life's insight and input somehow just marginally met the criteria of the subject matter at hand

Very disappointing. I usually succeed in getting a zero or one rating. I will try again for the gold.

It is probably obvious to everyone that I am a member of the Silent Generation. I blame my deafness on firing things like bazookas in the Army. Sounds better even though I fired only one once in basic training and can never remember a bazooka is supposed to be called the more sanitary "recoilless rifle." I always had a thing for a weapon that can take out folks in back of you as well as in front of you, like a Bush or Clinton.

The real truth is that I am hard-of-hearing because I am married to a Boomer, which is why they call them that. All that yelling does bad things to your hearing. You can see it here for proof positive.

Best, Terry

b. 1951.

Perhaps there is a systematic difference between the feelings of boomers that were in politics in the 90s and the rest of the boomers. They are cautious, but we are still pissed about Nixon and Reagan. We're still angry that the outrages, enormities, and violations of democratic principles that keep being perpetrated by conservatives are not being addressed. We're especially pissed that our meager chance for a little bit of progress was cruelly stomped on during the Clinton impeachment, when the GOP tried to do what the people absolutely did not want. We want payback.

I am rather confused by this debate. Baby Boomers might be traumatized but George W. Bush is a Boomer as are the very successful Rightwingers who have also had a say in American politics. Also, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford and the elder Bush are hardly Boomers. One of the things that upsets people is that the "Free Speech Movement" the "Yippies" and the general anti-War pro-Civil Rights movements were rebellions against a certain American cultural and political outlook. They succeeded in regard to race, women and many other cultural aspects of American but they also caused a backlash by fellow Babyboomers.

Even if Boomers are aging not only are they still the single biggest cohort but other than perhaps being more spoiled than any generation ever and thus feeling mrore entitled who says they are out of touch with American Culture? Americans are willing to have a more equal society in which government plays a role in the economy. It does not seem to be anxious to have high taxes and a government to tries to make every choice for individuals.

If Obama seems to offer any change it is not about feeling less of a sense of failure but it is being less stressed by race and American military power. Boomers, specially those of the Upper Middle Class, have been fighting over white guilt and American guilt since the March on Washington and the Gulf of Tonkin. The Cafe seems to be a repository of the continuing guilt trip regardless of age.

Bill Clinton attempted to overcome this guilt by straddling issues. He made goverment a partner both in America and around the globe. It was no longer a cure all, a source of heaven on earth but a catalyst for a better life for individuals. His wife and Obama both seem interested in continuing this view and leaving Reagan's government is the enenmy and the Lefts the government is cure behind.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

From CNN All Politics, September 13, 2000:

The latest state polls indicated the two candidates were running neck-and-neck in the race. A survey released by Manhattanville College showed Lazio with the support of 46 percent of respondents, while Clinton had 43 percent, with a margin of error of four percentage points. A poll released by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday indicated Clinton has a 49 percent to 44 percent lead over Lazio, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Sort of mixed numbers, there. But, I believe it was at the first debate that Lazio got in her face. Stupid move on his part. I was watching from Oxford, MS, and just flinched when he did that. I figured he was toast at that point.

From Online NewsHour (Oct. 19, 2000):

With the election less than three weeks away, polls show Mrs. Clinton with a slight lead over Lazio in this largely Democratic state.

From Quinnipiac University:

October 31, 2000 - Clinton Slips And It's Neck And Neck In New York Again, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Her Loss Shifts To Undecided More Than To Lazio First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's support has slipped among New York State likely voters and she gets 47 percent to U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio's 44 percent -- a race too close to call, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Nine percent are undecided.

And finally, so you can just about overdose on this:

Again, a Q-poll:

November 6, 2000 - Clinton Jumps To Big 51 - 39 Percent Lead In New York Race, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Gore Tops Bush 55 - 34 Percent


First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has opened up a big 51 - 39 percent lead over U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio among New York State likely voters, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Nine percent are undecided.

And just ignore that Gore Tops Bush. Sigh.

Yes, indeed. America makes it's greatest progressive strides when the youth 18-24 are galvanized.

I have no disagreement with this, as long as we recognize that we  youth didn't galvanize ourselves.  I was one of those youngsters. Look at the list of heroes of the left during that era.  One of them, Howard Zinn, is still around, still writing well, still fighting the good fight at 85. So is Daniel Berrigan, now 86.  His brother, Philip, died in 2002.  Bishop James Pike died in 1969, at the not very ripe old age of 56.  William Sloan Coffin passed to his reward at the age of 82 last year. The list of Civil Rights Movement Leaders of course includes Martin Luther King, a half generation older than the students at the lunch counter sit-ins, and his mentor, Bayard Rustin, then in his early fifties. My own personal galvanizer was Dr. Benjamin Spock.  When I met him in the 1960s he was on the faculty at Western Reserve University Medical School, way past the baby book stage, and active in all sorts of left wing causes.  He'd eat lunch in the graduate school refectory on his way to or from this or that meeting or march for a sane nuclear policy, protesting the Viet Nam War, or other good causes.  He was in his mid 60s then, roughly the age I am now.  He nurtured us "kids" and inspired us. 

I've wondered who galvanized the students of the post-Vietnam 1970s and early '1980s.  Perhaps the problem with progressivism today is that nobody galvanized them then.  We thought we had "won".  The sexual revolution happened, the troops were home, we had a partial test ban treaty, a SALT Agreement, Voting Rights acts, the draft ended, and so too many of us went home to private lives, while the right, which never gives up, reorganized, planned, strategized, and prepared to disassemble the gains we thought we had made.  I'm thankful for the ongoing presence of the old guard, who never gave up the fight.

aMike

"play the word game with somebody else"

Now, that really is projective. There is a difference between playing with words, which is what you are doing, and understanding the meanings of words.

"not all self-reliant individuals in tribes think in lockstep"

That is a better way of putting it. It is one thing to belong to a tribe, and something else to elevate the superficial aspects of tribe membership to the status of a cult.

It seems to me that the word "conformity" suggests adherence to a stereotype. I don't think that I am a Quaker conformist, even though I could recognize some sort of high-order similarity between myself and the Quakers, because, for one thing, I never became a Quaker, and for another thing, what I saw of the Quaker way of life, although it had principles, was not what I would call a stereotype. In fact, the way Quakers think things through is quite antithetical to stereotyping. Of course, the people who coined the word "Quaker" were stereotyping. The Quakers call themselves the Society of Friends.

By and large, I do not see that boomers (that is, those who accept the label of "boomer") see any distinction between what the label "boomer" implies and what they actually think. So that makes them quite different from Quakers, where the stereotype really does not fit (or at least it is long out-dated, if it ever did fit).

Maybe I am not reading you guys correctly, but I cannot see that anybody is actually denying that the "boomers", so-called, are conformist. What I see is a lot of non-denial denials.

Something about this conversation is not doing anything to elevate my impression of boomers.

The truth is, I do not relate well to your choice of the word "tribe." Is my tribe "Western Civilization"? Well, maybe, but I am a fairly serious student of Zen, admittedly the Western variety, and I will freely admit that the true Eastern setting of Zen is beyond my understanding. But I have never actually attended a Zen center, so I do not fit very well into that category, either, if it is a category. It seems to me that you guys are embracing a category that is narrower than any category that I can figure out for myself. You seem to be embracind it quite eagerly, and your only objection is to having someone point that out.

I don't see anyone trying to point out to me the rich cultural complexity of boomer life (or an ode to simplicity, either). If I have missed something, one would think that someone would take that tack.

Swaggering simpleton ACT? What ACT -- he IS an idiot. I would hope that having had the disease we would be immune for at least a generation.

My personal take is that Bush is bright but brain-damaged: once he gets an idea in his head he can't seem to change it in the face of reality and even when it would be politically advantageous. Katrina is a case in point.

What is it about Clintonism as you define it that leads you to think it would 'rejuvenate the forces which lead to the rise of GWB?' It wasn't the good government and leadership of Clinton that lead to GWB but rather the affront he posed to 'values' of the socially conservative voters on several fronts as inflamed by those whose economic interests were challenged.

How about if we eschew the generalized generational discussion for a moment and talk about the two individuals in question, Obama and Clinton? Do we, does Andrew Sullivan, have any basis for saying, in effect, that Obama is preternaturally bold while HRC is paralyzed with fear?

She is certainly playing the game more cautiously than he is, at the moment. The "watch out, Waziristan" speech he gave today was certainly bold. But has either Andrew, Sullivan or Golis, or any commenter on this thread, made the case that her caution -- her fear, if you prefer -- is unwarranted, irrational? One is supposed to be afraid of, and cautious around, things that really are dangerous. I would think that she has at least 15 years of experience that have led her to a rational conclusion that she'd better be damned careful what she says. Remember that her demonization by the wingies got off to its start in the 1992 campaign, when she commented that she could have just "stayed home and baked cookies." Many times since, innocuous, even laudable, things she said or did have been twisted by the echo chamber into more evidence that she is the Evil Communist Ice Queen. The "traumatic" experiences commenters cite in the cases of various Boomer Democrats are elections that they lost. That doesn't seem like an imaginary source of anxiety to me.

Barak Obama, and John Edwards, for that matter, are saying bolder and more specific things in the debates and in their speeches. I submit that it probably has less to do with personality than with two astute, major-league politicians having made the calculation that tells them that they can afford to. She, just as astute, more experienced, and currently the front-runner, has made the calculation that in her case the cost would be much too high -- that skilled propagandists are standing by, waiting for a chance to make the cost much too high.