Commentary: Terminate 68

August 14th, 2008 Tony Robinson Posted in Audio, Barack Obama, Commentary |

It’s 2008 and we may finally be ready to put 1968 behind us. We are the survivors of the absolutist zealotry of the Bush years and the psychodrama excesses of the Clinton-era culture wars, and all of it has been a long hangover from the turbulent 1960s. Red and Blue America have battled for decades to today’s political draw, an ideological deadlock. The nation remains bitterly divided over what side you took on Vietnam, where you stand on feminism and abortion, whether you believe in public prayer or Darwin’s evolution, and where you stand on the 1960s. Or at least the older generation remains bitterly divided by that era, as the Bush-Kerry election revealed, with its replay of Vietnam’s Swift Boat battles.

But the younger voters—those under 29 who are surging to the polls in droves—they seem to be yearning for a new politics beyond those old debates—and they have their candidate. Obama is tapping into a generational fault line in American politics. 18- to 29-year-olds tripled and quadrupled their voting rates during this primary season, and Barack beat Hillary 4-1 in this demographic. “There’s no doubt that we represent the kind of [generational] change Senator Clinton can’t deliver on,” Obama said during the primaries. “Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the ’60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done.”

Obama has a point. For sixteen years, America has been governed by Baby Boomer presidents (Clinton and Bush). For longer than that, America has fought over the bitter divisions that fractured the nation as the Baby Boomers came to age amid 1960s turmoil. The older generation continues to obsess over these old battles, and a Clinton-McCain match-up would have offered yet one more chance to fight over the legacy of Vietnam, over doves versus hawks, hippies vs. hardhats, protesters versus soldiers, abortion versus choice, over drugs and the counter-culture, over feminism vs the virtue of stay-at-home moms.

Every four years, the older generation trots out its Bushes and Clintons, to once more fight over Vietnam, feminism, and cultural decay, just as they did back in the 1960s.

In this continuing battle, every night, the older generation trots out their predictable culture warriors on television news, where Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter battle Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore in histrionic and destructive smackdowns that bitterly divide the nation against itself.

Perhaps Obama is the candidate to put an end to what he calls “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom Generation.” Perhaps that is part of Obama’s appeal to younger voters. Clinton, Giuliani, or McCain could never rise beyond the political divisions of their generation. But Obama is running as a black man with hardly a mention of the racial struggles of the past . Obama is running against the war in Iraq without the Kerry’s Vietnam baggage as a 1960s Vietnam protester. Obama is even a candidate who openly admits his past marijuana use without conjuring visions of some counter-cultural hippie.

With Obama, and with election 2008, young millenials and their fresh political voice may finally dethrone the Baby Boomers—terminate 68.

KGNU’s national politics analyst, Tony Robinson, is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver. You can find more at http://mypoliticscampaignblog.wordpress.com/