Congress is in gridlock. Motives of the federal and Florida judiciary are suspected. The presidency lacks legitimacy. Confidence in the election process hangs by little more than the thin strand of a chad.
The Baby Boom has once again made its mark on American politics.
The generation that never trusted anyone over 30 (and now is said to trust no one) flexed its demographic muscle to forge an election outcome reflecting its political and cultural divisions and its uncompromising attitudes.
For the first time, a Boomer faced a Boomer for the highest office in the land. At first blush the virtual standoff did not seem to mirror the generation’s combustible contradictions. But the fight itself proved to be no less than a war that, somewhat like the 1960s, has left enough wreckage to clutter the halls of government.
In a figurative sense, the winner will limp into the Oval Office, politically wounded by the experience. This outcome became even more likely after the Florida Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling Friday ordering manual recounts of disputed ballots throughout the state.
Unquestionably it was a Boomer-style election. In Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, Americans had the choice of two indulged, entitled Boomers who offered them creative new ways to spend a very large surplus, but not much in the way of grand 21st Century vision.
But beyond that, Bush and Gore fought a cultural war that spoke to the soul of the Baby Boom Generation, whether the issue was abortion, prayer in the schools, affirmative action, vouchers for students in private schools, the content of movies and music or the general direction of the culture.
At a time of high prosperity, which should have been more advantageous to Gore, this cultural campaign contributed to the close election as much as anything else, said University of Maryland professor Howard Smead, who has written a book on the more than 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. (Some date the start of the boom at 1943 and its end in 1960, because many Americans who share Boomer values were born earlier in the 1940s.)
Smead said the generation is split between the liberal antiwar activists who took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s and a vibrant conservative element “who went to class and kept their heads down,” only to emerge in the last 20 years as vocal opponents of what Smead called “rights-based liberalism.”
Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president, was very much a factor in the election. He served to animate cultural conservatives opposed to the stands he took on their favorite issues, and he angered them with his celebrated affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The Clinton administration’s economic success did not fully rub off on Gore.
Rhodes Cook, a political analyst who studies voting patterns, said exit polls indicated the Baby Boom population evenly split its vote between Bush and Gore. Not only was the vice president unable to take full advantage of economic prosperity of the last eight years, Cook said, but Baby Boomers did not appear to be turned on to Democratic issues such as prescription drugs for seniors, a patients’ bill of rights or protecting Social Security and Medicare.
Gore sounded a more divisive tone in the campaign, promising to fight for Americans against vested interests, including health-care and pharmaceutical companies. Bush advertised himself as a “uniter, not a divider,” even though many of his proposals–such as tax cuts, Social Security reform, education vouchers–are highly controversial in Congress.
Bush’s declaration that he will be a man of compromise will not make him so. If he goes too far, he will risk angering a rambunctious conservative political base eager to see some of its issues advanced by a new president, much in the same way his father did in 1990 when he abandoned his pledge not to increase taxes.
The Texas governor has chosen some steadying, Silent Generation figures to form the heart of his administration–Dick Cheney and Colin Powell–that could make him less Boomer-like in the way he conducts himself. But the new president must worry about the followers who put him in office.
“The important thing about Boomers is that they don’t have a unifying event at their formative political stage,” said David King, history professor at Harvard University. “They have a divisive event at their core. It’s harder for Boomers politically to reach common ground.”
Michael Driggs, born in 1947, can relate to that. In the first wave of the boom, he said he was more conservative as a West Virginia University student in the mid-’60s than those who followed a few years later.
“Those Boomers born in the ’40s were adults before things began to change,” he said. “Our values were formed more by our parents’ generation. Those born later had a different set of values. I come from a group well represented in the Reagan administration, and I dare say in the Bush administration, that was very respectful of country, position, personal responsibility, the old values.”
Driggs served as an aide in a Reagan White House when the cultural war began to rage. Today he’s an Arlington, Va., businessman who believes that his generation did produce a definite cultural shift away from respect for institutions such as government, the military, organized religion and corporations.
Many of his generation have sought to exert their influence through interest groups, including those dealing with religion and the family, women’s rights, environmental concerns, and countless others, Driggs said.
“It’s a cultural conflict and a search for meaning by this generation,” he said.
Neil Howe, co-author of a series of books on America’s generations, agreed. He said Boomers were indulgently nurtured as children and when they came of age, they triggered a cultural awakening that focused on satisfaction of the individual, along with distrust of institutions. They have become “fixated on right versus wrong” in the cultural issues currently being debated in America, he said.
Boomers stress “the importance of culture. Listen to [former House Speaker] Newt Gingrich and Clinton, or former Education Secretary William Bennett,” Howe said. “They say that if you get the culture right, everything else follows.”
Without the influence of the GI Generation that fought World War II or the Silent Generation (born between the late 1920s and early 1940s) that were their parents, Howe said, Boomers have become dangerous to the body politic because of their cynicism and unwillingness to compromise.
“It’s much harder to compromise over values than over economic issues,” Howe said. “You can split the difference on economics, but you can’t on values.”
“There are no permanent friends or enemies [to Boomers], just interests,” Harvard’s King said. “The art of politics is coalition formation and knowing when to quit. What we see in both Bush and Gore is that they don’t tend to compromise.”
Michael Drury, a Boomer born in 1955 and an economist for McVean Trading Co. in Memphis, said the economic debate between Democrats and Republicans in Washington turns off members of his generation.
“A tax cut? Republicans are pushing that,” Drury said. “Most people are pretty well off and say a tax cut would be nice, but it’s not the be-all and end-all.
“And the Democratic issues of Medicare and Social Security, prescription drugs? Those are not Boomer issues. They’ve all got 401(k) plans and IRAs, and they think they’re all set. They never think through the future of the economy, and that wealth is a relative concept. If they think they are wealthy, they don’t know that they will simply drive up prices when they retire.”
Meantime the Silent Generation, known for its nurturing, conformist attitudes, has yet to elect a president, although one member, Walter Mondale, served as vice president. It rankles some.
John Boswell, an education professor at George Washington University and a member (born in 1931) of the Silent Generation, dislikes both presidential candidates.
“I see these two guys, and I say, `They don’t know anything about life,'” he said. “I don’t know what they really stand for.”
The presidency has gone into a state of decline with recent occupants, said Boswell, who remembers his years as a young student in the 1950s when President Harry Truman strolled by the university almost every day.
“We would razz him, and he always had some smart remark for us,” Boswell said. “Now there was a president. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who understood what pain was, Truman was a person who was real. Lyndon Johnson was not only real, he was bigger than life.”
