Simply Politics & News

[Paule]

The Hippie Era Just Won't Die
Paul Waldman
December 13, 2006


Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success (John Wiley & Sons). The views expressed here are his own.

Most people remember the 1992 Republican convention for Pat Buchanan’s blistering speech in which he declared that there was ‘a cultural war’ being waged, ‘a struggle for the soul of America.’ But there was another speech given that August in the Astrodome, just as important in retrospect if not more so. Marilyn Quayle, wife of the vice president, told the assembled GOP faithful what Buchanan was really talking about:

Much has been said lately about the need in this country for a new generation of leadership; that the moment has come for a couple of baby boomers to take the helm of this great and complex nation; that the time has come for generational change. Well, Dan and I are members of the baby boom generation, too. And yet our basic understanding of what constitutes good government and a good society is very different from that of the boomers who lead the other party.

We are all shaped by the times in which we live. I came of age in a time of turbulent social change. Some of it was good, such as civil rights—much of it was questionable. But remember, not everyone joined the counterculture, not everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution or dodged the draft. [roaring ovation from crowd]


The 2008 campaign has begun in earnest—Barack Obama made his first trip to New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton is working the phones to line up key supporters and the last few pieces of the primary puzzle are falling into place (the will-he-or-won’t-he nail-biting over the Kucinich candidacy is mercifully over). And now another generational change is beginning. It won’t be complete for a couple of elections yet, but we are beginning to see the twilight of the baby boom politicians. One day soon, we could actually have an election in which nobody talks about the 1960s.

Though the revolutionary boomer candidacy of Clinton and Gore in 1992 doesn’t seem that long ago to many of us, the boomers may be gone sooner than you realize. Let’s consider a candidate conceived in the celebration over V-J day in August 1945, and born in May 1946. In 2008 this candidate will be 62, still prime campaigning age. In 2012 he’ll be 66, still vigorous but perhaps without the spring his step once had. In 2016, two elections hence, he’ll be 70, near the upper limit for a presidential candidate. By way of comparison, Ronald Reagan was 69 when he took office, older than any other president. Bob Dole was 73 in 1996; his age became his chief liability, the personal attribute around which the late-night comics built every Dole joke. And John McCain would be 72 upon taking office if he were to win in 2008.

What this means is that our presidential campaigns—and by extension, our politics more generally—is headed for a dramatic transition. In the 2008 race, every major candidate in both parties, with the exception of Obama, could be called a baby boomer. At the very least, for the rest of them the '60s occurred when they were young people, either teenagers or young adults. Four years from now, the contenders will probably be a mix of baby boomers and post-boomers. Four years after that, post-boomers will dominate, with perhaps a few baby boomers hanging around.

There is no single accepted cut-off date for baby boomers, but one way to think about it would be whether you had hit high school by the time the 1960s ended. But it’s nearly as hard to pin down the end of the 1960s. Because it is the cultural and political legacy of the sixties that defines the baby boom, that is where we should set our dates. And "the Sixties" as embodied in the cultural and political emblems we remember today didn’t really begin until around 1963. The best place to mark their end might be with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

So where do our current presidential contenders fall? What follows is the year each of the presidential candidates was born, ranked from oldest to youngest, along with the age each will be on inauguration day in 2009:

Republicans
John McCain: 1936 (72)
Tommy Thompson: 1941 (67)
Newt Gingrich: 1943 (65)
Rudy Giuliani: 1944 (64)
George Pataki: 1945 (63)
Chuck Hagel: 1946 (62)
Mitt Romney: 1947 (61)
Duncan Hunter: 1948 (60)
Mike Huckabee: 1955 (53)
Sam Brownback: 1956 (52)

Democrats
Joseph Biden: 1942 (66)
Wesley Clark: 1944 (64)
Christopher Dodd: 1944 (64)
Hillary Clinton: 1947 (61)
Bill Richardson: 1947 (61)
Tom Vilsack: 1950 (58)
John Edwards: 1953 (55)
Evan Bayh: 1955 (53)
Barack Obama: 1961 (47)


Still Fighting the Hippies

The current incarnation of the culture war didn’t just begin in the sixties—it is, to this day, about the '60s. That decade divided the country in two: you were either cool or square, with it or a stuffed shirt. Which side of that divide you placed yourself—whether you grew your hair long or cut it short, supported Vietnam or opposed it, thought free love would lead to the decline of civilization or thanked your lucky stars it came along while you were still young—continues to determine how people who were around at the time look at not only the '60s, but today’s politics as well.

Consider this piece of public opinion data, courtesy of the National Election Studies carried out every two years since 1952 by the University of Michigan. One of the NES questions asks respondents how liberal or conservative they think the candidates running for president are. The ratings given to Bill Clinton by people calling themselves conservatives would have made him the most liberal presidential candidate of the last half-century—more liberal than Hubert Humphrey, or Walter Mondale, or Michael Dukakis or even George McGovern. Now if you think Bill Clinton is more liberal than George McGovern, you’re living in a strange fantasy world. But the conservatives of 1992 and 1996 rated him as more liberal than the conservatives of 1972 rated McGovern.

Why? Consider that avid culture warrior Newt Gingrich once called Bill and Hillary Clinton ‘counter-culture McGoverniks,’ as though they spent the Summer of Love driving to Haight-Ashbury in their VW Microbus, dropping acid all along the way. Anyone who has seen photos of Hillary from that time knows that she was more than a few steps from ‘counter-culture.’ As for Bill, he didn’t even know how to inhale. In fairness, the two did work for George McGovern in 1972—but Bill, the recent law school grad, was in charge of McGovern’s Texas campaign, a staff position that probably necessitated the wearing of a tie.

The facts of their not-so-misspent youth are beside the point. The Clintons came to embody everything that conservatives hate about the '60s. For better or worse (and there’s a case to be made for each), a general election in which Hillary is matched up against a Republican will almost inevitably see one more smackdown between the hippies and the squares. (And if you think which Republican it is matters at all, consider the drubbing war hero John Kerry took from draft-dodgers Bush and Cheney over Vietnam.)

There’s no doubt that Barack Obama is hoping that voters, particularly those in the Democratic primary, will be looking for a respite from the 40-year war that began when his opponents were young adults and he was in elementary school. "Although his instincts were right on target," Obama recently told The New York Times , speaking about Bill Clinton and the bitter disputes of the '60s, "and I think, intellectually and pragmatically, he understood that America wanted to move beyond those categories, in some ways he was trapped by his biography." In other words, the fact that Clinton was a baby boomer meant he had no way of transcending the culture war—Obama is attempting to make the case that he can.

Yet today’s culture war can be seen as just an updated version of the one we were having 30 and 40 years ago. The religious, social, political and cultural divides of today still concern the same fundamental issues, a great many of which revolve around sex. To oversimplify a bit, America is divided between people who think that sex is a natural part of life, and you should be able to do it with pretty much whoever you please; and people who think sex is dirty and sinful and they should be able to tell you whom you can do it with and how. (Not to mention the fact that we’ve got our own updated Vietnam—and once again, the liberals were right and the conservatives were wrong).

The passing of one generation of politicians is unlikely to change that. I’d be surprised if we aren’t still arguing about sex 20 years from now. And even if baby boomer politicians are getting long in the tooth, baby boomer voters—and even plenty of their parents—will still be heading to the polls for some time to come. According to the U.S. census, in 2004 there were 113 million voting-eligible Americans between the ages of 18 and 44—those born after 1960—compared to 107 million born before 1960, the boomers and their parents. The post-boomers are now a majority, but their elders are still calling the shots.

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