Many readers rightly pointed out that I was overly broad to ascribe a certain Clintonian political defensiveness to all liberal "boomers." Rick Perlstein, being interviewed by Chris Hayes, makes a point that focuses this issue: the defensiveness is generational, and more specifically it's a reaction to a specific experience some had within that generation:

The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats--and I'm 35--have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats.

This is extremely important:

One difference between Obama and Clinton does not seem to me to have been stressed enough. They are of different Democratic generations. Clinton is from the traumatized generation; Obama isn't. Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation.

I hear echoes of this constantly from boomer liberals (and younger liberals too heavily influenced by boomer mentors). "You can't say that, imagine the ad they'd cut!" "Remember what happened to McGovern/Dukakis/Mondale when he said that?!"

It really drives me insane.

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