This from Carolyn Lochhead, Beltway correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle:

In Congress, the motherlode of superdelegates, the thinking is that the nomination is Obama's unless Clinton pulls off a decisive win in Indiana. If she does, then all bets are off and Democrats are in big trouble.

For weeks, the Obama campaign (and we supporters of it) have been hypnotized by "the math" that shows his "insurmountable" delegate lead. But there's a terrible catch that we don't seem to want to see:

Those counts include the superdelegates who have made endorsements. And all those endorsements are non-binding. The superdelegates can change their minds at any moment.

And they will change their minds, the second they see Obama as unelectable, or as having lost his momentum, or as being unable to handle right-wing attacks about Wright or Ayers. Howard Dean just said it: the duty of the superdelegates is to make a decision based on electability, not the winner of the pledged delegate horserace.

All those superdelegates who endorsed Obama when he was riding high because they wanted the party to close ranks will feel perfectly entitled to shift to Clinton if they come to perceive the Obama campaign as a sinking ship.

In short, the "delegate totals" that the campaign keeps tossing out as proof that not even a loss in Indiana can change the outcome are meaningless.

This is the real math: if Clinton finishes the primaries 100 pledged delegates behind Obama, she'll only need a 450-350 split among superdelegates to catch him. How hard will that be if she's coming off a series of big wins and national polls, like today's AP poll, show her stacking up better against McCain?

The Obama camp's fury about the superdelegates "overruling the voters" will ring hollow if Obama hasn't won a tough race since February and he's trailing in the polls. Party leaders have no interest in nominating a candidate who piled up a delegate lead with a strong February and then backed his way through a flat March, April and May.

I don't want to be shrill, but I feel I should repeat myself, because when I've said this before people keep responding with, "But if you look at the math..."

All the math we're being shown includes existing superdelegate endorsements. And existing superdelegate endorsements don't mean squat.

Look at the superdelegates who have already switched from Clinton to Obama. You think they can't switch back?

The bottom line: Barack Obama can still lose the nomination. Easily. Indiana can kill the dream.

He has to go back to campaigning like he wants to win. And then he has to do it. He has to win.

I strongly encourage all of us who support Obama, and especially everyone involved with the campaign, to silence the chant we've been hearing since the day after the Wisconsin primary: that Obama's nomination is a mathematical certainty. Ever since that became the accepted wisdom of the campaign,  he's turned cautious and reactive, and he's seemed conflicted and confused about his messages. And Clinton has gained ground.

Today Howard Dean announced that the super delegates should make their decision on "electability," not the number of pledged delegates, and he asserted that the supers have the "right" to vote contrary to delegate totals. This on the same day that the AP reports Clinton performing much better against McCain than Obama.

There's clearly a growing movement within the DNC to find a way to seat Michigan and Florida's delegates, even though that will probably benefit Clinton.

And then there was Obama's own statement that Indiana could be a "tie-breaker." Most indications now are that Clinton should be able to win there, especially with the help of Rush Limbaugh's "operation chaos." (It's an open primary, remember.) Going into the last few states she'll be able to claim that she broke the tie in her favor and that she's demonstrably stronger against McCain. Which, according to Dean himself, is what the super delegates should base their decision on.

Obama is still entirely capable of backing his way out of this race. I'm afraid that the belief that his nomination is "inevitable" makes that far more likely.

I love the image of Barack Obama riding from town to town on a locomotive, giving whistle-stop speeches off the caboose like a taller, darker, prettier Harry Truman. Mostly I’d rather not associate him with Truman, who I think was generally a jerk who pissed off more people than he had to and wounded the Roosevelt coalition. But Obama has this in common with him: Truman ran his own style of campaign, letting his flaws show as part of his reality, sticking to his message even during the stretches when it wasn’t selling too well, and he finally won despite all the standard analyses of how a candidate should win.

The mainstream pundits have all been critiquing Obama's “weak” performance in the last debate, as he fumed and stumbled against the ménage à trois of Clinton, Stephanopoulos, and Gibson. And yet that “weak” performance led to a national eruption of rage against ABC in particular and old-style Beltway-bitch politics in general. It led to his largest-ever political rally, 35,000 strong in Philadelphia, and the endorsements of three party heavy hitters. It led to another big surge in fund raising. And some polls are showing that it boosted his popularity.

Carla Marinucci in the SF Chronicle has a nice article here on how "millenial generation" voters are just not responding to the same old political stimuli the way the handicappers expect them to:

"No, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama hasn't been in the habit of wearing an American flag on his lapel. Yes, he's got some controversial acquaintances and has made some slipups lately about working Americans who 'cling' to religion. So won't it be easy for Republican Sen. John McCain, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton - and the media - to keep painting Obama as an ultraliberal elitist who is out of touch with American values and working people?

"In another era - when Baby Boomers were the overwhelmingly dominant generation - maybe so. But with just two days until Pennsylvania kicks off the final round of primaries, political observers say there's clear evidence that the election of 2008 represents a new universe - and a new generation - when it comes to White House contests...."

I'm sure Obama did hurt himself with some voters in the debate, but I think there was a strength in his open frustration, too: it reminded us that we don’t have to play these games anymore. Had he worked the debate like Clinton, juggling balls of crap with the rest of them, he would have been only another efficient, old-time politico, winning the kudos of the pundits but giving us nothing new. By continuing to show up as who he is, both strong and weak, he forces the game to change. He becomes the change (pardon the cliché) that we want to see and he makes it a little bit easier for the rest of us to do so too. And I do believe it’s working: every time they chuckle “gotcha” and wait for his poll numbers to drop, he only comes back stronger. Because the game is changing fast around them, and they don’t want to see it.

As a diagnosed sufferer from Obamaphrenia, I sometimes can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s being whispered by those audacious and insanely hopeful voices in my head. So I need a reality check from others, not only fellow Obamaphiles but Clintonians and neutrals as well: Has Hillary badly overplayed her hand in this “bitter” debate?

What I see is that Obama made a clumsy mistake, and she shrewdly jumped all over it. But instead of just hammering at the idea that he’s “elitist” and “out of touch,” suddenly she’s running around acting like a lifelong deer hunter and pretending that her anti-NRA political record doesn’t exist. So the focus is shifting back to, “Is Hillary making things up again?”

She reminds me of a football player who has a perfect chance to fall on a fumbled ball but is so eager to pick it up and run for a touchdown that he bobbles it back to the offense. Of course, the officials haven’t ruled on possession yet…

As Senator Obama continues to try to dig his way out of his “bitter” hole, I wonder if he might just tell the truth—that he was trying to explain America to rich liberals in terms they can understand:

“You go into these left-wing fundraisers on the coasts and their political clout has been gone now for 40 years and nothing’s replaced it. And they’ve felt through the Carter administration and the Clinton administration that each successive Democratic administration has said that somehow their political relevance is going to regenerate and it has not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to elitism or stereotypes about small-town America or antipathy to people who own guns and go to church as a way to explain their frustrations.

“So what we have to do is reach out to these people and lead them back into the American coalition. But we have to lead them slowly, because these traditions of condescension and patronization that they pass on from generation to generation are important to them. That’s what sustains them.”    

Just a thought.

So Obama's remarks have branded him as an elitist who doesn't know what it's like to be an average American and is too fond of his own eloquence and is surrounded by ivory tower intellectuals who think they're more enlightened than everyone else.

So we should support Hillary, a straight-talking fighter who really gets the experience of the common man and surrounds herself with canny, realistic political battlers.

Can we come up with another elitist who didn't know what it was like to be an average American and was too fond of his own eloquence and was surrounded by ivory-tower intellectuals who thought they were more enlightened than everyone else? Yeah, Franklin Roosevelt.

How about another straight-talking fighter who really got the experience of the common man and surrounded himself with canny, realistic political battlers? Like Harry Truman?

One built a great coalition that transformed the country. The other one pretty much just pissed people off, lost the  coalition and severely his own party.

I'll have the elitist, please.

When I first read Obama's remarks from the San Francisco fundraiser I thought he'd just shoved his foot halfway down his throat. Lumping religion with guns and anti-immigrant feelings; saying people "cling" to religion as if it's something they would shed if they knew better. I knew what he meant to say and knew it was true, but I also knew why Christian (and gun-owning) voters would feel profoundly insulted.

As a San Franciscan I understand completely how that wording would come out of his mouth. He's talking to a roomful of rich, educated left-wingers who pride themselves on being cosmopolitan, anti-gun and too enlightened to identify with a single religion, people who are predisposed to hate a deer-hunting churchgoer who wants illegal immigrants deported. A genuine, humane effort to articulate blue-collar frustrations to that crowd could so easily come out like that: of course they cling to religion and guns in their well-deserved bitterness.

Unfortunately he seemed to be thinking entirely about the audience he was facing, not how it would play in Uniontown, PA.

But then he responded, and once again his response has not only dealt effectively with the problem but even raised his message to a new level and opened a national conversation that will probably help his campaign—and the country as a whole—far more than it will hurt.

Tactically it was brilliant. He substituted "turn to their faith" for "cling to religion" as if it was what he'd said in the first place; if he just keeps saying that, the clumsy first version will be subsumed. And he made it sound as if Clinton and McCain's objection was to the very idea that Americans are bitter and frustrated; which isn't quite true, at least in Clinton's case, but it puts them on the defensive and forces them to prove that they get it.

But beyond the tactics it's true. And that continues to be what thrills me most about Obama and his candidacy. He leads us to take about the truth while his opponents just keep rolling out the same old cheerleader chants.

I see a lot of puzzlement expressed as to why Hillary Clinton  is still attacking Obama even though his nomination is virtually assured. No mystery to me: in 2012 she'll be 64 years old, still primetime for a presidential candidate. Now that she can't be nominated her game plan has to switch to doing what she can to helping McCain win this year so that she can come surging back with a triumphant "I told you so" and win the next election.

She can't be so overt about it that she hardens the mass of Democrats against her, but under the guise of being a fighter who still thinks she can win she's free to plant many thoughts in voters' minds that will hurt Obama in November. Hence the new theme of her criticisms: he's an elitist who can't beat McCain. Sometimes things come true if you predict them enough.

There's nothing wild-eyed or implausible about this. It's very well documented that a lot Democratic insiders, in collaboration with some big labor unions, actively undermined McGovern's campaign in 1972. They felt that four more years of Nixon, and a chance to "reform" the nominating process, would be better for their branch of the party in the long run. And the Clintons are widely felt to have put their own interests over those of the party from the day Bill was elected in 1992.

The good news for Obama is that he has a lot more clout with the leadership of the party than McGovern did. Still, watch for Hillary Clinton and her loyalists to find many passive-aggressive ways over the next seven months to encourage her supporters to stay home or switch to McCain in November. It's the only thing that makes sense for career plans.

So a couple days ago I get an email from the Obama campaign asking for volunteers to call Indiana and encourage people to register to vote. I go to the website and as usual they've posted the Top 10 Callers. They're all way past whatever I'll ever be able to manage, mostly around 400, 500, with one close to breaking 1000. But at the top of the list is this woman Patricia Gold, who's already credited with 5,172 calls. The email just went out and she's already called 5,172 people! How is this possible? I mean, just at a physical level, given that time can't be slowed down or sped up except at unsurvivable velocities, how could one person do this?

I'm puzzling over this when I start to realize: this "Patricia Gold" sounds familiar. Like maybe I've seen her on a list like this before. So I go to an old bookmark and sure enough, there she is: leading the "Invite volunteers to travel to Indiana to register new voters" call list at 1796, while slow, pathetic, underachieving Stanley Graham drags in at second with only 350.

At this point I know I have to learn more about this woman—plus it's always so much more fun to play Google than to do any actual work—so I start hunting down past 10 Top Caller lists. Yep. Mississippi: Patricia Gold, 2203 calls, double the second-place Barbara Shotwell. Wyoming: Patricia Gold, 1118 calls, half again as much as Denis Neba. Texas: Patricia Gold, this time in a squeaker, 2562 over Claudia Sutton's 2420. Northern states, Southern states, big states, small states, Patricia carries them all.

(Strangely, though, she's not on the Top 10 at all for Pennsylvania. Is this because she knew it was a state she couldn't win and diverted her resources elsewhere? Or could it be that she's already in Pennsylvania, walking around canvassing door-to-door while she's on her cell phone to Indiana? At this point, nothing about Patricia Gold would shock me.)

My first thought is, this has to be a fake. A campaign strategist decided they need a name on top of every list with an absurd number of calls to stir up volunteers' competitive instincts, and some focus group reported that "Patricia Gold" was the perfect Barackist name. Not too odd, not too generic, doesn't betray any particular generational affiliation (á la "McKenzie" or "Madge"), a whiff of Jewishness to appeal to the educated left-wing but not so indisputably Jewish that gentile voters feel alienated.

But then I think, no way. How devastating would it be to the real volunteers if some Fox reporter or Clinton snoop discovered that the call lists were gimmicked? (And wouldn't I feel stupid if I were the one who kicked off the investigation?) No, Patricia Gold must exist. Some actual woman out there has really, truly (unless she has a deeply codependent spouse and children making calls in her name) racked up at least 10,289 Obama-calls to Indiana, Mississippi and Wyoming, states where the campaign started just a month ago.

The mathematics horrify me: over 2500 a week, 360 a day, 30 an hour (they tell you only to call between 9 AM and 9 PM). That's a call every two minutes. A lot of those will be 30-second messages on voice mail, but there are also plenty of people who like to talk, and surely Patricia Gold is not one to shy away from an energetic plea to an undecided or a crackling exchange with a Clintonite.

But that's where my Googling hits the wall. My big questions remain unanswered. Who is this woman? What does she do? And more important, what will the poor thing do after the election is over?

I just read the feel-good poll of the month—and it feels good not just because I like Obama but because I really, really want to like Americans. A new CBS/NY Times poll finds that 70% of Americans believe that Obama "shares the values most Americans try to live by." 66% say the same about McCain, 60% about Clinton. And this is after all the talk about Jeremiah Wright.

This has left a lot of pundits scratching their heads. How could people hear Obama's pastor say "God damn America" and yet still feel that he shares their values? But here's the thing: for the political geeks, politics are everything. For most Americans, they're not. In fact, politics come pretty far down our personal agendas, after family, friends, community, and just getting along with the people around us.

We all have people in our lives whose politics we don't share, often actively dislike. So maybe your minister, priest, rabbi, guru, therapist, or astrologer trots out some screwy opinion about AIDS or Iraq. Who ends a relationship, who trashes a spiritual and personal connection, over that? A few days ago a friend of mine, an Irish Catholic Democrat from New York, got an email from one of her favorite aunts claiming that the Book of Revelation identifies Barack Obama as the anti-Christ. Did she denounce and reject her aunt? No. She rolled her eyes. Which is basically what Obama did when Wright's speeches hit YouTube. He rolled them eloquently, and with perhaps a few too many words, but that was pretty much the gist of the message: the pastor is a cranky old guy with some obnoxious ideas, but what can you do?

This is the essence of inclusion and unity. It's what makes Americans pretty good people when we're at our best. It's so easy to get fed up with our national political culture when I'm spending too much time reading anonymous comments on websites or listening to televised blowhards that I forget that the simple business of making my way through daily American life, among people of vastly disparate worldviews and opinions, is usually very pleasant and rewarding. It's good to know that the rest of us...or 70% of CBS/NYT poll respondents, anyway...understand that too.

This from Matier & Ross, political columnists for the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Bill Clinton who met privately with California's superdelegates at last weekend's state convention was a far cry from the congenial former president who afterward publicly urged fellow Democrats to "chill out" over the race between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama.

In fact, before his speech Clinton had one of his famous meltdowns Sunday, blasting away at former presidential contender Bill Richardson for having endorsed Obama, the media and the entire nomination process.

"It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended," one superdelegate said.

According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage.

But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

When he finally wound down, Bill was asked what message he wanted the delegates to take away from the meeting.

At that point, a much calmer Clinton outlined his message of party unity.

"It was kind of strange later when he took the stage and told everyone to 'chill out,' " one delegate told us.

"We couldn't help but think he was also talking to himself."

When delegate Binah - still stunned from her encounter with Clinton - got home to Little River (Mendocino County) later in the day - there was a phone message waiting for her from State Party Chairman Art Torres, telling her the former president wanted him to apologize to her on his behalf for what happened.

Still, word of Clinton's blast shot all the way back to the New Mexico state Capitol, where Richardson spokesman Pahl Shipley reiterated Tuesday that his boss had never "promised or guaranteed" Bill and Hillary his endorsement.

...Once again he's willing to alienate potential supporters and risk damaging his wife's campaign in order to play the angry victim. Could we please keep this guy far away from our White House? I mean it, Hillary: forget the tax forms. Announce that you're filing for divorce. That alone should be worth 10% more of the vote in all the remaining primaries and a few dozen superdelegates.

Ask me what the weather was like in Ohio on March 4th and I'll tell you. Go on, ask me! Highs in the 30s, gusty winds off the lake, inch to an inch-and-a-half of snow and sleet. But here's the thing: I wasn't in Ohio on March 4th. I was in California. The weather in California on March 4th? Hell if I know. Because, really, where I was wasn't California, it was Google News. California was just a hyperlink to the electronic text of my election-obsessed reality.

Not now. Now I actually wait for the morning paper to read the news again. Now I actually talk about other things first and get around to the election after the weather's been covered—the weather here and now, not the forecasts for April 22nd in Pittsburgh and Erie. I'm actually getting some work done on my book again. It's not just me, either. People I was trading emails with twice a day before Ohio-Texas have faded away over the past week, back to...I don't know...work or kids or whatever their lives were about before Obama.

From what I'm hearing from contacts on the campaign trail, it's even true in Pennsylvania. Even in the one state where anyone's campaigning, voters are burning out and wishing it would just be over. Once we thought Pennsylvania would be The Decider: six weeks of relentless campaigning building to a frenzy never before witnessed in American politics! Then both campaigns started lowballing expectations. Unless Obama pulls off an upset or Clinton's predictable win is huge beyond all predictions, April 22nd's results will change nothing. And the polls show what the whole race has shown since Super Tuesday: Clinton and Obama's supporters seem intractable. There are Clinton people and Obama people and if "undecideds" actually exist there aren't many of them. Jeremiah Wright didn't change anything, Bosnia didn't change anything. Through six weeks of campaigning the whispered undercurrent by all sides is, "Clinton'll win by 10%, okay swell, when's Indiana again?"

We've entered the horse latitudes of the election, where the limits of our resources come clear and we have to jettison what we can no longer sustain. Time to heave my great time-wasters and energy-burners—the poll fixation and the delegate counting and the spin-in-place emails—over the rails. Unfortunately, it's easier to get rid of the horses that actually require work: phone calling, canvassing, fund raising, getting out the vote. And if we fall down on those, that's when the election dynamic starts to change, when Clinton's wins get big enough to matter, when the independents' disgruntled support for McCain starts to solidify.

I think sustaining the energy is going to be harder for Obama people than Clinton people. The Obama campaign has been based on zeal, fire, and the rising tide. Even those of us who felt tired and jaded before he won us over have picked up the exuberance of his 20-something core. The Clinton campaign is based on stubborness and cynicism. Jadedness seems to be almost a prerequisite for supporting her. It's a more reliable mentality in the doldrums.

The only way I know to keep going is the same way I run long distance or keep writing through the seemingly endless middle of a book: Remind myself that there won't be any thrills for a while, like there are at starts and finishes. There won't be any turning points, any electrifying news, any relief from numbing irresolution, not for a while. I'll have long stretches of wondering why the hell I ever took this on and whether the end can possibly justify the slog. But I know there's no reward in stopping, and I know there's a big triumphant ending out there somewhere, so I just keep putting one foot, one word, one frigging phone call after another.

Scott Helman at the Boston Globe summarizes the exit polls and finds this: 119,000 Republicans voted for Clinton in Texas, where she won by 101,000 votes. This is clear numerical support for the argument that Rush Limbaugh has been making and no one in the Democratic Party seems to want to say out loud: Republican mischief is the reason Clinton's candidacy is still alive.

Helman's numbers also suggest that, without GOP votes for Clinton, her victory in Ohio would have been a slim 5%, and that Obama would have picked up several more delegates not only in those states, but as many as five more in Mississippi.

Republicans cross over to vote for Clinton because they believe she'll be easier to beat in November. So remind me why her victory in Texas and "big margin" in Ohio are supposed to show that she should be the Democratic nominee?

Ask anyone concerned with the growth and healing of people and institutions—a therapist, a religious leader, an addict in 12-step recovery, a motivational speaker, or that consultant your company hires for team-building workshops—and they’ll all agree with one principle: you can’t solve a problem unless you can talk about it. If we can’t be honest about our fears and resentments—with an expectation that we’ll be listened to with a measure of openness—then they’re only going to fester.

So how is this country ever going to get past its racial tensions, especially in politics? I applaud Barack Obama’s effort to run a “post-racial” campaign, but one of its side effects has been an intensification of our reflexive, angry suppression of racial discussion. As unpleasant as Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright’s recent comments were, I don’t see us helping ourselves when the only responses we hear are cries of “race-baiting” and demands for heads to roll. Maybe the way to be “post-racial” or “trans-racial” or “inclusive” is to talk without venom and sloganeering about why so many of us bring race into our political decisions.

Like, I keep wondering if this blue-collar white resistance to Obama in the Rust Belt isn’t so much due to “racism” as to decades of experience with ugly battles between white and black Democratic political machines. Philadelphians remember the Rizzo machine being replaced, not always to good effect, by the Wilson Goode machine in a racially split election; more recently they’ve seen John Street disappoint the early promise of a broad-based administration and fall back on “the brothers and sisters are running the city!” cant. I think there may be a lot of white people who’d like to see themselves as being willing to vote for a black man but find some experienced-based worries getting in their way. Maybe the reason Obama does so well among blue-collar whites in Illinois is just that they’ve known him long enough to see how well he works with the Daleys, the Blagojeviches, and the Reznos to believe that he can avoid the old us-and-them politics that Chicagoans know so well.  (I don’t know that this eases the minds of voters like me, but then latte-sipping Prius-drivers aren’t the main issue in the Pennsylvania primary.)

But how can we find out if this is true or not—how can we understand what this racial divisive is and how we can get past it—if we can’t talk about it?

I like the tone of Obama’s most recent comments on divisiveness in the campaign, but I feel that there’s more he can say. He’s better positioned than any politician in our history—and, as an orator, perhaps more capable—to lead us to think more deeply about our own ideas of race, ethnicity, identity and national unity. And now is the perfect time to start. There are risks in talking openly about a subject that makes us all so uncomfortable and that we have all been so conditioned to fear mentioning in public.  But there might be huge rewards too. It might be good for the campaign, giving him the chance to reassure white voters that he understands their reservations and that it’s safe to move past them-and-us politics. It would certainly be good for the country.

David Ignatius recently wrote a column in the Washington Post expressing his doubts that Barack Obama will be an effective bipartisan "bridge builder" because he "has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington." Later in the same column he writes that "unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles." His point is that creating true bipartisanship often involves opposing the more divisive elements in one's own party, which is true enough. But it strikes me as a peculiar idea that one must "make enemies" and bear "obvious political scars" to bring parties together.

It comes as no surprise to me to learn that David Ignatius was born in 1950, in the thick of the "baby boom." Because this is the essence of boomer politics: There must always be enemies. There must always be scars.

I've never been able to consider myself a "baby boomer." Any demographer would include my birth year, 1957, in the boom—it was the crest of the wave, in fact, the peak procreational year in American history—and yet, the people who generally identify themselves as boomers are distinguished by a set of cultural and political experiences that I do not share: an awareness of America before the mid-'60s upheaval; a consciousness of Kennedy and the impact of his death; a visceral involvement with the Vietnam War; the draft, or at least the fear of it; an active experience of the Counter Culture, or an active reaction against it; a lifelong sense of "the '60s" as a personally formative moment.

Not me. I never heard of Kennedy until he died. It seemed like Vietnam and the anti-war movement had always been on TV as I became vaguely aware of what my parents watched before dinner. I'd learn later that the draft was the reason my brother joined the Coast Guard and moved out when I was nine, but I didn't get any of the connections at the time. I turned ten during the Summer of Love. One day that summer my mother drove me to Haight Street because she was about to take her first job as a high school teacher and figured she ought to know what it was all about; all I remember is that a young man gave her a flower, which I thought was some sort of official greeting, and that we had lunch in a place that sold piroshkis. I liked piroshkis—that's what I learned from the Summer of Love. The assassinations of 1968, Kent State—news stories I couldn't quite comprehend. I didn't even hear about Woodstock until the movie came out a year later; I was in seventh grade and far more interested in the next Planet of the Apes sequel. The war was over and the draft being abolished a couple of years before I had to worry about it. The big song at my senior prom was Mandy, and the first election I could vote in was the 1976 California primary: Jerry Brown vs. Jimmy Carter.

To me the great battles of the '60s are a mixture of vaguely remembered news items and historical recountings. The great battles of my own '60s were in my backyard and mostly involved G.I. Joe. I grew up hearing about baby boomers, but the phrase always referred to my big brother's peers, those grinning, yelling, fearless, arrogant, argumentative, eternal adolescents riding their roller coaster of manic idealism and self-pitying disappointment. There was no label for us quieter, humbler, more conciliatory little brothers and sisters of the boomers, and that's just as well. A lack of generational self-consciousness suits our temperament just fine.

During the 1980s we heard much about the rise of those "children of the '60s" who were becoming the mainstream. Surely, we heard, they would surely change the world yet again with their vast numbers and hunger for change. When Bill and Hillary Clinton took over the White House after 32 years of occupation by the generation that had come of age in the Depression and World War II, when they danced at their inaugural ball to Fleetwood Mac, looking so young and alive, the boomers were enshrined as the generation in power. But it wasn't just the old lefties, the ones who'd gotten all the media attention during the '60s, who'd ascended. The big rebellion had shocked other baby boomers into action too, Young Republicans and neocons and angry anti-hippies and newly politicized evangelical Christians. Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove represent their generation just as thoroughly as the Clintons and Gores, and the tribal elders of both right and left were "proto-boomers" of the same vintage: Jerry Rubin was born the same year as Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney the same year as Bob Dylan.

But left-wing or right, the generation has shared a single approach to public life: endless conflict.

This is a generation that has always defined itself through denouncing an Other. We're us, they're them, and we have to fight them to remember that we're us. Once the "us" was generational, the youth movement that didn't trust anyone over thirty. That was the battle line that gave the generation its original unity and power. Over the decades the "us" has proven to be endlessly plastic, but the basic dynamic doesn't change. The "culture wars" have been mainly a boomer fight. Dan Quayle brought the baby-boom style of symbolic combat to presidential politics when he attacked Murphy Brown as the embodiment of all that was wrong with liberals, Democrats, and the media. Just as the over-thirties with their Sinatra and their martinis could be objectified, so could those liberals with their un-American values and entertainment. (And how perfect for a man born in 1947, part of the first tube generation, that wave of kids raised on Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, to launch his culture war over a sitcom.) Karl Rove's divisive electoral strategy is a literalization of the same attitude, its implicit underpinning being that it's fine to hurt, enrage, and alienate those people as long as we win the power struggle and piss them off.

In struggling to retake the electoral center in the wake of Reagan, the Democrats have never embraced the culture wars so openly (anyway, it's hard to fire up the troops by advocating unwed TV moms) and have shown far more willingness to transcend party lines. And yet, they've certainly enjoyed playing the hipper, smarter party, parading their movie stars and rockers, still defining themselves as the young rebels to the parental Republicans. From the conversations of boomer Democrats you'd almost think that Bush's Texas drawl and cowboy affectations were as offensive as his politics. And the Clintons and their peers have always relished their literal and metaphorical boxing gloves, their battles against vast conspiracies and attack machines. In the end, the Clinton administration was hamstrung nearly as much by its own partisan gamesmanship as by the assaults of the Republican Congress.

Yes, I'm over-generalizing, I know that. Plenty of boomers hold the opposite ethos; they were the first generation, after all, to go big-time for Buddhism and Sufi and other philosophies of transcendence. Some of my best friends are boomers. But those who have led and shaped the generation politically, those who rose to positions of power when the boomer ship came in, have been driven by an angry passion for being right—and for seeing the other side as wrong. By a need to define an "other side" even when there doesn't have to be. By a love of arguing, of mocking, of righteous indignation. A joy in watching opponents sputter in frustration. An intolerance of contrasting viewpoints. Little interest in "win-wins" or the "big tent," preferring a vivid delineation of who's hip and who's not, who's telling the truth and who's not, who's right and who's not.

There's a power in that, no denying it. The most combative leaders of the generation are capable of great things. Their intellectual energy is inexhaustible. They are fearless in their willingness to dispute what has been handed to them from the past. Their innate belief in their own rightness gives them an extraordinary resilience: have there ever been two more indestructible politicians than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? But mostly the "'60s generation" has squandered its powers and wasted its potential in endless skirmishes and the hunt for new skirmishes.

To me, this is Hillary Clinton's tragic flaw. For all her dedication to children and health care, issues close to my own heart, she ultimately limits her effectiveness and hurts her causes through her reflexive combativeness. She has become a "polarizing figure" not simply because conservatives have developed a neurotic fixation on her (although they have), but because she plays the part with such obvious joy. She has defined herself by her battles with the vast right-wing conspiracy and the Republican attack machine to such an extent that she can't see outside that even as the electorate, driven by younger generations, tells her that it's done with those battles.

Among Clinton's criticisms of Obama—which I hear echoed by many of her boom-aged supporters—is that he's never had to stand against the right-wing attack machine, that he won't be able to survive it. She asks us to support her because she's "tough" and "a fighter." This is a frequent justification of Clinton's own attack strategy: she has to prove that he's "not tough enough" before the Republicans prove it and it's too late.

And yet, through most of this race at least, Obama has grown more popular as he is attacked. His success is largely founded on the belief that the opponents' attack machine can be mostly dismissed because the attack itself has no more power than we give it. The voters under 50 who are driving his campaign don't want to give attack machines power, and so the attacks are blunted or even turned back on themselves. But the Clinton camp, wedded to the idea that enemies and conflict define us, can only see this as naivete, more evidence of his unreadiness for the battle with the Republicans. At times Clinton and her followers seem almost addicted to battle, to the maneuvering and short-term victories and tit-for-tat squabbling—but most of all to the anger. They see Obama's call for unity as weak because their entire sense of political identity is built on the eternal hostility of us and them.

Eleven years after my mom took me to Haight Street, another woman led me back there: my girlfriend moved to the neighborhood in 1978 and Haight was our main street. There were still relics then of the explosive moment of the '60s—we were always walking by the purple Victorian with the sign reading, "The Jimi Hendrix Electric Church Foundation"—but there were also the twitching speed freaks in the doorways and the panhandlers on the sidewalk and the sullen long-hairs in the book and record stores who looked suddenly so much older than their years. My sense then was that a powerful wind of dreams and ideology had swept down the street and left wreckage behind. The kids my age and younger—call them late boomers, after-boomers, downslope-boomers, or, better yet, give them no label at all—suddenly looked a lot better to me. Without a lot of noise and fireworks, we were trying to clean up the wreckage and make the place habitable for all of us again.

When I look at the aftermath of the Clinton and Bush years, I see the same wreckage. When I look around me, I see the same desire to clean it up. Not through more fighting and more finger pointing, but just through doing what we have to do and doing it together as best we can. I look at the candidate born in 1961, and I hear his rejection of those decades-old battle lines, and I know it's time to put a new generation in charge.