Maybe I'm wrong, but this young Georgetown woman's math seems off.  First, I think there are only three,  not four, "more" young voters lined up behind Obama.  Maybe she didn't intend to insert the word "more," but she did and, I think, doing so throws the math off.  Second, extrapolating from the Georgetown 7 men in 60 members and the one to four Hillary vs. Barack overall ratio, I think there are about 23, not 1, out of every 1,000 Georgetown men supporting Hillary.  Of course, that ignores Republican Georgetown men.

Oh, SNAP! The author is a man, not a "young Georgetown woman." And his article was as much about the social isolation of being a male Hillary supporter as it was about being young.

But Michael understates the generational issue. It's not just twentysomethings, and it's not just "Sixties-era" politics that non-Boomers disdain. There is a lot of resentment toward all things Boomer, including Boomers themselves, as such, among the several generations of people younger than the Boomers. Hate to break it to the Boomers, but none of you all are in your thirties, and few in your forties. Those of us who are in our thirties and forties tend to have a very dim view of the Boomers and their bumbling and destructive stagger through American history ahead of us. The one age cohort that went solidly for George W. Bush in 2000? Yeah, the Baby Boomers. That's only the tip of the iceberg -- the Boomers have given us pretty much all of the bad outcomes in recent American history with almost no real positive legacy to balance out the failures -- but it's representative.

Oh, and the whole Civil Rights thing Boomers like to brag about? Happened before the Baby Boomers. The "Good Sixties" happened while the Boomers were still mostly in grade school. The "Sixties" that Boomers talk about, which actually mostly happened in the 1970s, had nothing to do with Civil Rights. In fact, the period between the Baby Boomers reaching adulthood and reaching retirement age has been an era of Civil Rights stagnation, more or less coincidental with the period between the murder of MLK and the candidacy of Barack Obama.

So, yeah, McCain and Obama have some latent appeal because they're not "really" Baby Boomers -- McCain because he's actually not, and Obama because, though he actually is, his early childhood overseas and his adolescence in Hawaii makes him more a product of the early post-Boomer years and more like a Gen-Xer in outlook.

The "rancor of sixties-era partisans" is not only disdained by our younger fellow citizens, it is also beyond their comprehension.  This no doubt is due to their vastly superior wisdom, equanimity, moral compass and fraternal spirit -- advantages we also claimed at the same age some years ago.  

The rancor of course is attributable not only to our relative weakness of character, but also to the events of the past 7 years, which have raised many issues again that inflamed the years of our youth: unjust war; greed and social injustice; authoritarian and dishonest government; illegal surveillance; the use of fear and zenophobia to restrict civil liberties; repression of the rights of women and gays; criminal neglect of the environment etc etc etc.

Yeah --- what do we have to be pissed-off about?

Neil

It's not just love for Barack Obama amongst young people.

It's distaste for HIllary. She's about as big of a politician as they get. And young  people's BS-meters work very well...

Rhubarbs

You're right about the legacy of the boomers -- it isn't what we hoped it might be, especially in view of the last 7 years.  Of course, blame for the recent retrograde movement might be more fairly and accurately placed on the "right-to-life / let's roll" crowd -- ie, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Confederate flag enthusiasts -- than on the boomers.  It has been more about faith, and less about generation, in my view.  

Naturally, you miss a few things in your broad swipe at a very significant generation.  Although I was 12 years old when King was killed, many people my age were deeply influenced by the "good sixties" - which I take to mean active citizenship, opposition to an immoral war, rejection of racism, support of the liberation of women and gays, support for programs to end poverty, and a commitment to reverse years of environmental degradation.

Had you been around in 1968, you might notice how very different things are today, but I am disappointed.  We have slipped badly in this new century, and we all have some work to do. Don't cast us boomers off just yet - you might be able to use some of us.

Neil  

This article is from Slate, and I gotta say, this kid is a wienie. It took the entire article before he even bothered to tell us why he is choosing Hillary: I get to explain why I have chosen to support Hillary. I get to talk about her command of policy and her fierce political intellect. I get to explain why her plan for universal health care is superior and why I trust her more when it comes to foreign policy.

The first two parts I give her, she is a vicious wonk (although at lot of her wonkiness is nuts, freeze rates, $5,000 for every child?) Her plan for universal health care is doomed to fail (how universal is it if all illegal immigrants and resident aliens are not eligible, and mandates are red meat for Republicans) and to trust her on foreign policy is to trust a weather vane.

He wouldn't last 10 minutes on TNR talkback without degenerating into pccosetello territory.

Hey Neil, give it up Hippie. Your time has passed, give a new generation a shot at it. Just because you changed the world in the past, doesn't mean you hold sway over it forever. New slogan, don't trust anyone from the 60's. The challenges of the new century are not ones that the boomers are equipped to deal with,  because they simply don't have the time to see them through. The boomers have a role, but it should be to assist the next generation instead of trying to lead it.

Neil,

I painted with a deliberately broad brush, and such strokes always obscure at least as much as they reveal.

In fact the Baby Boomers did achieve at least one lasting historical improvement in American society: The near-completion of women's equality. That's huge, and it's lasting, and it's something to be proud of.

But what generation fills the ranks of the "right to life / let's roll" crowd you bemoan? That's right, Baby Boomers. Fact is that that Boomers have always had more conservatives than liberals among their cohort. A decisive chunk of "Reagan Democrats" were Boomers -- the majority of Boomers who didn't go to college but instead had to enter the working class and face the draft and often start families straight out of high school.

Anyway, aside from debate over the factual achievements of the Baby Boom generation -- and don't worry, every generation accomplishes less than it hoped; read the lamentations of the elderly Founders for some consolation here -- what I meant to describe was a relatively widely shared simmering resentment of Boomers as such by following generations, not merely resentment of any particular Boomer characteristic. Such generational or class resentments don't depend on fair or accurate assessments of the historical record; they're more a matter of zeitgeist and the emotional atmosphere of the times. Probably Oedipal or something in this case, too, since we are talking about younger generations' resentment of their parents' and grandparents' generation.

As a Boomer, I can honestly say that I am tired of my own generation.  We've had two Baby Boomer presidents and I have seen enough to not have any qualms about handing things over to the next generation (but have serious qualms about going backwards with McCain).

Sure, our generation did some good things.  All generations generally do, but I agree with Rhubarbs that people tend to forget that for all of the progress (and permissiveness) supposedly hatched and nurtured by the Boomers, there are truckloads of narrow-minded conservatives amongst the boomers as well and that influence has been almost totally disregarded.  Anecdotal evidence is never truly empirical, so take this with the qualifiers due, but it seems that half the guys I went to college with who voted for McGovern started working on their MBAs as soon as they got a high draft number.  

I think Andrew Sullivan's "Why Obama Matters" in the Atlantic (Is mentioning a competitor allowed in here?)a month or two back is the seminal piece on this whole topic and one of the best pieces of political analysis I have ever read.

As for Hillary, it's the old Churchill "time and the man (in this case, woman) coming (in this case, not coming) together."  Part of me empathizes greatly with her, as she really has done everything that a woman was expected to do to "join the club" as a serious candidate for President.  People tend to forget that she, although left-of-center, still qualifies more as a pragmatic moderate than an ideologue.  But Dale Bumpers did all the right things too and he never got to be President.

You have all convinced me to abandon my boomer generation and join the 30-somethings.  Where do I sign up?

blackton -- thanks for the hippie label.  Made this CPA chuckle.  

Rhubarbs -- my argument is not that boomers are not among those guilty of the Bush legacy, but that it helps to break that huge group down and see the contributions of particular groups.  Once you do, I think you'll see that the looney religious right, which includes large numbers of folks your age as well as a fair number of boomers, has more to do with the failures of recent years.    

In any case, we boomers are going to live a long time, and we will continue to be a factor in politics -- imagine how tired of us you will all be in 20 years (I'll be 72).

Neil

On the subject of Andrew Sullivan's article in praise of Barack Obama, did anyone else think that his endorsement of Obama was an explicitly racial argument, at least in part?  Have Bill or Hillary done anything close to that?  Then why are they the ones accused of injecting race into this campaign?  Isn't it Obama's friends - Sullivan and Oprah for instance - who have made race the basis of their endorsements?

INeil

I saw more of a generational slant to Sullivan's Atlantic article than a racial slant.  But being white and middle-aged, that's probably what I was looking for.