Barack Oboomer

In the movies, the best leading men have always been able to portray younger characters - John Wayne played iconic gunslingers into his 50s, Cary Grant was the suave romantic lead into his early 60s, and Harrison Ford will reprise Indiana Jones this spring at a spry 65. Actors like Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Nicolas Cage can easily take on parts playing men a decade or more junior to their biological ages.

The more I watch the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that is Barack Obama, the more I realize that the  Senator from Illinois - the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination - is a political actor skillfully portraying a much younger character, and to rave reviews at that.

Obama will turn 47 years old before the delegates to the Democratic convention are seated in August. Yet he is leading what has been described as a generational movement of younger voters, the so-called millennials who were born in the 80s and came of age in the years after September 11, 2001. He is cast by the media as being part of that movement, a much younger voice in American politics than that of Hillary Clinton - who like a lot of leading female actors, must play her biological age pretty much straight up.

But Obama is either a Baby Boomer, according to some generational studies, or he's a Generation Xer, according to others. It's a generational tagging quandary I know pretty well, being less than a year younger than Obama. Culturally, we're either late Boomers without the groovy 1960s experience, or early Gen Xers without the 80s hair gel. Our group came of age in the 70s - we're all Watergate and punk rock, Son of Sam and Bronx is Burning, CBGB and Carter's national malaise. Reagan picked off the conservatives among us, but left the liberals with permanent case of cynicism as as we began our careers. Culturally, we were just kids when the Beatles were in their prime, but we were too old to get much out of The Breakfast Club and that 80s brat pack ilk.

Music makes us late Boomers, I think. We wore out the grooves on the Stones and the Who, and slid easily into the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Patti Smith - and  all the variations on R&B, reggae, soul, and funk; we took the sound of the 50s and 60s and changed it. Not a one of us grew up on the hip hop beat. So when Obama's campaign events mash up Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke and John Fogarty's Centerfield, the Doobie Brothers' Takin' It To The Streets and  Shining Star by Earth, Wind & Fire, it's a familiar late-Boomer soundtrack. The artists are a bit older than we are, but damn, we grew up on these tunes.

Likewise, the big names in Obama's campaign are just a bit older than he is - media mastermind David Axelrod is 53, as is Oprah Winfrey. Insider Valerie Jarrett is 51. Caroline Kennedy - who the media went wild for passing the "generational torch" to Senator Obama - is 50. The senior kitchen cabinet of experienced hands is much older still: Tom Daschle is 60 (same as Hillary), Illinois power broker Emil Jones is 72, and Teddy Kennedy is 75. The closest advisor of all, the dynamic Michelle Obama, is another member of the shoulder generation at 44 - either a last-minute Boomer or an early Gen-Xer. To my admittedly cursory view, there are no inner circle Obama advisors under the age of 40.

Yet, Obama's is the MySpace and Facebook campaign, easily leading support among the group of voters from 18 to 30, a more idealistic group of young voters than the one that preceded it. Obama is leading the incredibly successfully (but still maddeningly vague, in my view) campaign for "change," with a rallying cry of "yes, we can!" It all feels like a movement, feels like something bigger than a mere campaign, feels like a youth movement in American politics. And it should - because that's how it was drawn up on the storyboards. The incredibly successful strategy was designed to both attract young voters, and convince the supposedly jaded media - many of them Boomers themselves, pining for the lost movement of their youth - that something big was changing.

And at the center is an aging star playing a much younger man.

Barack Obama is often compared to John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president, who presided over the passing of the torch to "a new generation of Americans." But there's a massive disconnect in this comparison. Kennedy was actually part of the generation he was seeking to lead, a young World War II veteran seeking to remake the national polity to serve the energies of his generational peers. Indeed, his Republican opponent in 1960, Richard Nixon, was also a member of that generation. When JFK spoke about service to his country from a generation of young Americans, he was speaking as a proud member of that generation.

In contrast, Obama has a good two decades on the very generation he has become an icon for. In movie star terms, he's Sean Connery leading the squad of younger G-men in The Untouchables.

Senator Obama himself often uses religious imagery to deal with the generational dynamic at work in his campaign. Last March, when civil rights leaders converged in Selma, Alabama to commemorate the famous march of the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965, Obama discussed two very different generations in his well-received remarks. One was the "Moses generation," that group of leaders who brought their people out of slavery but didn't quite make it to the promised land. That task fell to the "Joshua generation," a biblical reference to the son of Moses and a metaphor for Obama's own campaign and its surge of young voters and activists. The ceremony in Selma marked the accomplishments of great African-Americans, yes. But in the hands of the Obama campaign, it also served as Obama's explicit claim on the millennials as his own, his marker of authenticity.

In truth, Obama is younger than the Democrats he ran against - Clinton (60), Dodd (63), Richardson (60), Biden (65), and Edwards (54) - but he's a junior member of their generation nonetheless, a tail-end Charlie who was still using a sippy-cup when they were lighting up. And he's a true generational contrast to Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain, 71, who would be the oldest president ever elected. But it would be a stretch even to call him a Gen-Xer - Obama was a community organizer in his new hometown of Chicago in 1986 when Pretty in Pink hit the big screen, and was undoubtedly as interested in the social angst of our younger Gen-X friends as I was as a young reporter in the Bronx.

"The key to Obama's appeal to young voters," wrote Cora Currier in The Nation recently, "may be that he resembles them." And indeed, as a biracial candidate who talks often about non-partisan government solutions while making it a point to distance himself from Boomer attitudes towards government, he does. But in his growing coalition of big labor, African-American leadership, and upscale progressives, Obama also hearkens back to traditional Democratic strongholds - and his legislative record is clearly that of a Democrat from the post-industrial urban north.

In an essay for Newsweek, self-described millennial independent Andrew Romano wrote that "millions of my peers have fallen under the spell of the freshman senator from Illinois." And indeed, it's true. In every primary or caucus thus, more than 50 percent of voters under 30 have gonna for Obama. But Romano gets to the heart of it when he says that "it's not so much the strength of Obama's youth support that's significant—it's how fully and seamlessly he embodies the attitudes, aspirations and shortcomings of the generation that's rallied around him."

Indeed, it's the portrayal of millennial attitude - the "post-everything" ideal described in a New York Times essay by Yale junior Nicholas Handler - that suceeds mightly for the Obama campaign, combined as it is with an adept use of social networks, text messaging, and other new media tools. And it's a portrayal that is landing him the political equivalent of an Academy Award. Just listen to how the young Andrew Romano describes the contrast in candidates: "On one side is Clinton, the consummate baby boomer. On the other is Obama—not a late boomer, as his birth date would suggest, but the first millennial to run for president. For better and for worse."

To my ear, there are echoes in this of Toni Morrison's famous anointing of Bill Clinton as the first black president in a New Yorker essay a decade ago. Barack Obama may be coming up fast on 50 and feeling every day of it, but young voters think of him as a millennial; in other words, he is not really what he is - he is what we want him to be.

In their new book Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais make the case for a rapidly-changing electorate in this country - one that favors the Democrats and more progressive public policy. According to Winograd and Hais, there are now twice as many millennials as Gen-Xers and a million more millennials alive than Baby Boomers. And I think the Obama campaign keyed in on this change at the outset, and branded their candidate - a good-looking middle-aged legislator from Illinois - as an exciting, young millennial voice.

Early last year, Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod told The Times Magazine: “If we run a conventional campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose.” In the same article, Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr sums up the Axelrod plan for Obama: “What David is basically doing — and this is somewhat new for Democrats — isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies. It’s a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?”

It's this personality branding that works so well in short-form media, like movies, television and yes, quickie Facebook profiles and viral YouTube videos. It may well turn off real-life late Boomers like me (I'm supporting Clinton, and her brass-knuckled focus on realpolitik policy after the Bush disaster) but it's a brilliant strategy for creating at least the media-fueled illusion of a wide-ranging movement of young people. I'm writing a book called CauseWired that will examine, in part, how millennials take their new form of activism online - and how leadership and personal brands may well change how we look at social activism and politics. I agree that the strategy to "sell leadership," as Axelrod put it, is tailor-made for online marketing as well as mass rallies in basketball arenas.

One of the defining moments of this campaign thus far was the release of an online video by Jesse Dylan (Bob's son) and will.i.am (aka, William James Adams of the Black Eye Peas) that synced  Obama's "Yes, we can" oratory with sung vocals by a bevy of celebrity singers, many of them millennials themselves. The four-minute video has already been watched more than four million times on YouTube. It's an incredibly effective piece of media, fitting like the missing puzzle piece to an already successful branding strategy around Barack Obama. And it stars a leading man playing a much younger part.

Barack Obama may be the same age as retired athletes like Mark Messier, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, and Dan Marino. He may have been born in the same year as middle-aged actors Eddie Murphy, Michael J. Fox, and James Gandolfini. He may share the years with well-traveled pop stars like The Edge, Melissa Etheridge, and Boy George.

But he plays a much younger candidate on television.

Comments

[bruce b.]

Very nicely done, Tom. This was very insightful, almost of essay-length, and a good kick-off to your book project. TW at his best.

I think it is very common for "older" people who are nevertheless a "new generation" of leadership to, in fact, inspire and relate to generations that are much younger. One example, of course, was JFK. Yes, he was part of the "WW II veteran" generation, and as you point out correctly, Nixon was part of that generation as well. Nixon and JFK in fact were fairly close in age. (JFK was born in 1917, Nixon in 1913.) However, JFK gave off the appearance of being "young" and "new", Nixon of old-hat tired politics.

In fact, the Kennedy/Nixon/ WWII vet generation held sway in politics for a remarkably long time, up though Clinton's election in 1992. Interestingly, the people that Kennedy famously inspired -- the "Peace Corp" generation of the early 60s -- were of course much much younger than JFK himself. Similarly with RFK, a man in his early 40s in 1968 who was a hero to people in their 20s.

Most of the baby boomer icons of the 60s, both in culture and politics, were not really boomers themselves but were a few years older. Dylan was born in 1941, John Lennon 1940, Keith Richards 1943, Hendrix 1942, Abbie Hoffman 1937, Tom Hayden 1939, Jane Fonda 1937, and so on.

Another interesting and related point is that Obama has managed to make a strength out of "missing" the 1990s political wars, as Bill Clinton has recently been pointing out. This gives Obama something in common with the "millenials" (what a terrible term). Similarly, the ancient Reagan appealed to the Gen-Xers, who had "missed" the 60s, something they thought they had in common with Reagan. Do you recall, in the 80s, when Reagan was "new" and "hip" and Teddy Kennedy and the other old-line liberals were portrayed as over-the-hill and tired?

If Obama ends up with the nomination, he will age quickly, and purposefully, as he establishes his "gravitas" credentials vis a vis McCain. Do you recall how poor Freddy Ferrer was hammered on the "gravitas" issue? What was that all about, anyhow? But Obama, like JFK, somehow seems to come with gravitas built in.

[jason chervokas]

Austan Goolsbee, Obama's cheif economic advisor, is,I believe 38 or 39, 40 at most.

[Gm]

And I believe Samantha Power who is his senior foreign policy adviser is under 40

[gravel kucinich paul nader]

WHERE DUTY CALLS

Nader Gravel & Paul Kucinich

Awake from your slumber
4 Wise Men march with the people
Washington DC

Whistleblowers
Honesty compassion intelligence guts
Not carrots sticks coercive diplomacy

Divided we fall
Mike Gravel
Dennis Kucinich
Ron Paul
Ralph Nader
No bribery blackmail extortion

Rage against the machine
Democracy rising democracy now
Suffer not

[bayareavoter]

great piece, thank you

[bayareavoter]

great piece, thank you

[ch]

I am 49 years old, much closer to Obama's age than Clinton's, and yet I despise Barack Obama. He doesn't "seem to come with gravitas built in" to me at all. On the contrary, he comes across as an actor playing a role, manipulating an audience, trying to be all things to all people. He also strikes me as a complete narcissist, totally in this for himself. The fact that he is able to sway younger people doesn't surprise me at all, as I think they are more naive and willing to be led. I am somewhat surprised, however, that they are willing to be led by a politician. Boomers were far more skeptical of the motives of politicians than this generation seems to be.

Barack Obama rings every bell in my bullshit detector. He embraces and encourages the adulation, and it is ironic that Jesse Dylan would make a pro-Obama video. Bob Dylan never, ever wanted to be a Christ-like figure to his generation. He rejected it out right: It Ain't Me, Babe. Obama revels in it.

Obama does not strike me as a rebel or a fighter, like Boomer heros James Dean, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Brando. He reminds me more of someone like Michael Jackson--someone smooth, slick, chameleon-like, and frankly, untrustworthy.

Strange the way we see people differently, isn't it?

[ChrisW]

Nice post, Tom. Call me crazy, but I also think his "Joshua generation" reference was a nod to the U2 generation (which is why I assume you posted a pic of the Edge in the post). The Joshua Tree was released in 1987, and is considered by some to be one of the best rock and roll albums ever produced. Is Barrack trying to be the Bono of politics?

[Judith]

Bono is the Bono of politics.

And as I said elsewhere, if Bono were American instead of Irish we'be be better off with him as the rock star nominee as he has done more for the global good than Senator Obama.

[ChrisW]

Judith - interesting thought. Not sure Bono would be dumb enough to run, though. Compared to the job he now has, which would you choose? BTW - he has done more for the global good than any of the candidates, not just Senator Obama.

[donna darko]

Barack Obama rings every bell in my bullshit detector.

It amazes me people buy this after 7-8 years of Bush/Cheney.

[Judith]

Chris W - he is a real rock star so why bother playing one on teevee? Besides, I'll bet his contract stipulates he gets paid in euros.

[Judith]

Tom - great post. Loved reading it.

I think the kids love him because he has no resume just like them. So if a guy with little experience can bs his way to the top job why they heck cant they?

woohoo - let's have another dotcom boom! It follows no business plan we've ever seen, where do I invest?????

[Tom W.]

Actually, I used those photos because all those guys are the same age - yet Obama is the youth candidate, strangely enough.

[bruce b.]

Obama has a pleasant "boyishness" about him, as did JFK/RFK, and the 1992 Bill Clinton.

Gene McCarthy and Ronald Reagan wee "youth" candidates well into their dotages.

Dumb question: who are the bottom two on the pics? I hate to expose my cultural ignorance here (or my senility).

Tony Soprano is/was an "old" 47. Unlikely he ever made it to 50.

[robert]

to over simplify..it's not about his age. all us little kids just want some attention (just a little sarcastic)from a candidate. I just saw him today at youngstown state university and I have never felt so moved by anyone in politics. not even close. Obama talked for a while about people like yourself who give the impression that us younger people being moved and motivated is somehow a bad thing. could he be more clear on the specifics..yes. could anyone make each and ever person strive to be better people and change this messed up world that "you people" have left us? No.

[robert]

oh, and for the equally sarcastic guy talking about no resume..have you ever heard of Abe Lincoln or jfk? both had very little Washington experience by most standards, not to mention that Dick Chaney has been around at least since Lincoln. didn't he vote against freeing the slaves? anyway if experience gets us another Chaney, I will promote the the new guy.

[ochairball]

what does age have to do with it? it's his ideas that are not only inspiring young people but all kinds of people.
many people have responded to his message because he is a good leader, which means he's able to inspire people to follow.
i don't think he's selling youth. he's selling a new way of thinking. some people are attracted to that and see him as genuine, others, who are more resistant to change, push it away and see him as phony.

[Judith]

uh...Robert...I am the one who pointed out that the no resume was a reason for people with no resume to like him. No sarcasm.

Of course, that doesnt explain the old farts who back him.

[Ralph]

All this venting about Baby-boomer or Gen-Xer is silly. Kurt Cobain was born in '67. Nirvana were the cornerstone of Gen-X music to follow in the 1990s. Obama loves Stevie Wonder - not your typical Gen-X choice for cutting edge in 1989. Hillary named her daughter after a Joni Mitchell song. But... who the hell cares? Late boomer, early Gen-Xer? This is all silly.

I don't know, but this whole line of thinking bothers me. This is all a distraction of the main issue - beating McCain in November. We should be asking ourselves who has a better chance at beating McCain in November. Of course 20-30s voters find Obama more appealing in some ways because he his as all the qualities of an underdog in the race. Clinton is an established Washington insider with an ex-President husband. Obama comes across as the 'younger' candidate because... um, he is younger than Hillary and his diverse background adds to that perception. And I will say this again and Tom will not listen again: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton rubs some Dems, especially the younger voters, the wrong way.

[Judith]

um, so it is dumb to talk about the way a guy is packaged for mass consumption, but not dumb to talk about a person's married last name as a block to their candidacy? Excuse me while I ponder thew weirdness of this.

[Brian]

Interesting post-- I daresay the best thing to appear on this blog in months.

As Bruce B. points out up top, and as my partner has also mentioned in conversations, the Obama phenomenon and playbook aren't new-- in fact, these passages:

Yet, Obama's is the MySpace and Facebook campaign, easily leading support among the group of voters from 18 to 30, a more idealistic group of young voters than the one that preceded it. Obama is leading the incredibly successfully (but still maddeningly vague, in my view) campaign for "change," with a rallying cry of "yes, we can!" It all feels like a movement, feels like something bigger than a mere campaign, feels like a youth movement in American politics. And it should - because that's how it was drawn up on the storyboards. The incredibly successful strategy was designed to both attract young voters, and convince the supposedly jaded media - many of them Boomers themselves, pining for the lost movement of their youth - that something big was changing...

..."The key to Obama's appeal to young voters," wrote Cora Currier in The Nation recently, "may be that he resembles them." And indeed, as a biracial candidate who talks often about non-partisan government solutions while making it a point to distance himself from Boomer attitudes towards government, he does. But in his growing coalition of big labor, African-American leadership, and upscale progressives, Obama also hearkens back to traditional Democratic strongholds - and his legislative record is clearly that of a Democrat from the post-industrial urban north.

could apply as easily to Bill Clinton in 1992 (master of Third Way politics and bringing together seemingly disparate approaches) (which I think is a good thing, btw) as Obama today (which you allude to with the Toni Morrison reference). I wonder if that sense of generational/rhetorical appropriation-- as deliciously ironic as it might be for those of us outside the campaigns-- isn't fueling some of the nastier back-and-forth between the two senators.
I was 19 in '92, which means Clinton was the first presidential candidate I could vote for, and whatever my qualms about him, I do remember a sense of excitement around his candidacy among students my age, which I now see in the students I teach, many of whom are campaigning for Obama. And I'm excited by that-- my primary isn't until March 4, so I'm still on the fence about who to vote for, but I like seeing people in their teens and twenties working for campaigns and getting involved. Given your own activism and aesthetic coalition-building with NewCritics, I imagine you do, too, but I do sometimes (perhaps falsely) get a slight feel of ho-hum condescension about such things from your posts, as if this aspect of the Obama campaign is somehow suspect.

I like the detailed tracing you do, I like the various cultural references, and at the same time, with tremendous respect, I must add, "...And?" As Bruce B. rightly notes, the line of polticians (JFK, Clinton, maybe even FDR) that Obama falls into always inspire generations younger than them, and always benefit from that reflected youthfulness. If Sen. Clinton could tap into a similar dynamic, don't you think she would (and wouldn't we praise her for that savviness?). And doesn't Sen. Clinton also package herself in response to this-- as the "facts candidate," as the anti-rhetoritician, and isn't that designed to tap a similar appeal among, perhaps, an older generation (as Kyra Sedgwick says to Campbell Scott in Singles, "I think you have an act, and your act is not having an act.")

Reading/misreading age, or even a generational style of address, goes both ways: for instance, I had wrongly assumed from reading your excellent blog over the last year or so that you were closer to Hillary Clinton's age-- the references, life experiences you noted and overall tone felt much more "boomer" to me than "late boomer," and became a filter through which I understood what you were arguing. You either benefited or suffered, depending on the post, from this misreading in the same ways that both Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton do-- not knowing you personally, I projected my hopes, anxieties, and opinions onto the image you presented. Like a candidate putting his ideas out there in a very purposeful way, you, in a sense, you controlled your presentation, but you can't entirely control my response.

Sorry if this seems rambling-- I really was provoked (in good ways) by your post, and this reponse is just my way of working out my conflicted feelings about it. But thanks for posting it-- it does help me to better understand the generational positioning within some of your primary posts the last couple of months, and I think it raises a lot of important issues.

That said, would it be too much to ask for more baseball posts, soon? (:

[Slappy]

Someone who inspires the youth and gets people excite about politics? The horror!

If someone has this talent and he is on your side, take advantage of it and use him. He is an asset. Even if he is all smoke and mirrors, he is bringing people into the Democratic party and that can only help win elections which trumps EVERYTHING else in importance. People want change. Clinton and certainly not McCain do not represent change as Obama does. Dean took over the DNC and declared a 50 state strategy. I whole heartedly back this and Obama more than Clinton did too and it has paid off. NY, CA, NJ, TX may be enough to get you over, barely, but long term it is foolish. Obama has a broader appeal than Clinton. We should be cheering him on.

[tina oticica]

I've been mesmerized by this post since I saw it on Twitter. I've passed it along to boomer friends with early-20s kids as a reference guide.
My husband, who is 43 and French, claims Mitterand ran and won on exactly the same empty platform as Barack Obama: change. He added, pragamatically, as a good engineer he is,"If the guy is going to bring victory to the Democratic party, put him as a vice-president to Hillary."
But I just can't stand the guy's chameleon-like speeches. Yikes. Throw some inter-generational Valium my way, please.

[Esoth]

So, let me get this straight. . . . Obama is both too young and inexperienced to be seriously contending to be POTUS, and should step aside and let his elder assume the throne. . . . and he's also too old to be getting "the kids" all hot and bothered and upset. The quality of the attacks on Obama, and the increasingly oblique angles taken to try and outflank him, have an almost pathetic quality to them. All of these weeks and months, as successive arguments are formulated, trotted out, totter around awhile before collapsing. . . .meanwhile, the polls give way to actual voting in state after state, in a series of lopsided Obama wins.

A common underlying premise, in the attempts to land-mine the rest of the primary course for Obama, is that people voting for Obama are not being rational (how could a rational person but choose Hillary?). Mostly, the blame is laid on Obama himself, that dual-poser, at once an under-qualified striver trying to fake his way up, and now simultaneously, an over-the-hill has-been, hanging out and trying to act cool for the younger generation. But as the votes have piled up, a lot of direct resentment is beginning to leak through the attacks against Obama, and the subtext is aimed directly at the voters, in a replay of that familiar liberal reflex -- the voters aren't good enough or smart enough to deserve Her Majesty.

A week ago, maybe two at the most, the bulwark of HRC's strength (according to her supporters) was the honest, enduring support among the blue color classes, whose common sense and innate decency made them immune to Obama's fancy talk and elitist enthusiasms. But as the campaign continues to broaden to reach across demographics, Obama is capturing more and more of this working class group (as well as virtually all others) and suddenly, the blue collars ain't quite so noble, as James Walcott, and ardent Hillary advocate, notes in taking blue collar males to task in his latest post:

"Lunch room, locker room: the trash talk is still being batted around about women as if everything's the fault of a few feminist bitches with frigid temperatures and Tilda Swinton hauteur who insist on being where they're not wanted, going where they don't belong. And underneath the trash talk is the even more unattractive noise of white men whining because things aren't like they used to be. No, they are not."

What happened, in the space of less than two weeks? Did the salt of the earth suddenly lose its flavor? No. The unforgivable sin for blue color males is that too many of them voted for Obama.