At last night’s New Hampshire Democratic Party dinner in Milford, I had, by the end of the evening, the uncanny feeling of revisiting the 1968 generational rift within the Democratic Party -- minus the Vietnam War and its attendant inter-party rancor. In ’68, I should note, I was an 18-year-old kiddie staffer for Eugene McCarthy straight through the Chicago Convention, where the rancor between the seasoned Humphrey regulars and the anti-establishment and in many instances much younger Kennedy and McCarthy delegates and staffers inside the convention hall and the convention headquarters hotel was almost as great as that between the protestors and the cops on the street. The typological differences between the camps were almost as obvious as the anger. Among the men (who greatly outnumbered the female delegates in those days) a short-haired, clean-shaven young guy in a suit was almost surely a Humphrey machine regular, whereas – well, you know the stereotypes, and they’re pretty damned accurate. When creatures from these two distinct worlds bumped into each other on the convention floor or in the hotel lobbies, which happened constantly, more often than not they rather coldly and almost programmatically ignored each other. Now, don’t be alarmed – that wasn’t the vibe within the large, heated, strangely-lit tent-like dome in Milford last night. But when Obama spoke, and he came after Hillary, the dynamic in the room was that of a movement overwhelming the regulars, of a generational shift. The fire marshal, who’d been able with no difficulty to keep the aisles clear when Hillary spoke, stomped around helpless and appalled as Obama’' followers clogged the center aisle. The diners at the Hillary tables sat in silence throughout Obama’s speech, as his legions – his largely younger, more casually attired legions – filled the dome with cheers. And gradually, as Obama delivered a characteristically electrifying speech, quite a number of Hillary’s supporters rose and filed out of the room, not in anger but conveying a sense, however unintentionally, that a wave was sweeping over them, that a new force had arrived and a new establishment was being born. The Obama kids probably don’t think of themselves as a new establishment in the making, but then, back in 1968, neither did us kids on the McCarthy campaign. Neither did Hillary Clinton. --Harold Meyerson
