Way before Andrew Sullivan canonized the theme, Barack Obama was presenting himself as the only presidential candidate who could pull the country out of its baby boomer "culture wars" mentality. I heard him make this argument explicitly at the Planned Parenthood forum in July. Now, in a thoughtful piece, The Nation's Lakshmi Chaudhry goes a step further, identifying Obama not only as anti-baby boom, but as a typical Gen X-er. Although the generation that came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s is widely understood as politically apathetic, Chaudhry convincingly argues that some of the most exciting people in progressive organizing today hail from Gen-X: Markos, the Drum Major Institute's Andrea Batista Schlesinger, and Sustainable South Bronx's Majora Carter. But here's the problem with lumping Barack Obama into that group: He's technically a baby boomer. Born in 1961, the Senator from Illinois predates the end of the baby boom (1946-1964) by three years. Of course, it's true that Obama's political rhetoric and life experiences set him apart from candidates like Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, who seem so defined by what they were doing (or not doing) during the late sixties and early seventies, when Obama was just a kid. I point out that Obama is a card-carrying member of the baby boom mostly to call attention to how silly these distinctions are. Sure, the experience of living through Vietnam and the student protest movement indelibly shaped politicians like Clinton and Mitt Romney. But every generation has its liberals and its conservatives, its hopeful optimists and its hard-nosed power brokers, its intellectuals and its businesspeople. Furthermore, a "generation" is almost impossible to define in any self-contained way. That's why Bill Richardson's accusation in the last debate that Obama wants to set off a "generational war" was particularly lame. Obama cares very much about the youth vote. That might prove to be a political folly, but his kind of youth outreach is incredibly important to the future of Democratic politics, and it's hardly a "generational" war cry. --Dana Goldstein
