A Boomer in Chief? No Thanks.

By Jon Keller
Sunday, November 25, 2007; B05

They're handsome and intelligent. Their biographies are scandal-free. They're fresh, optimistic faces in a candidate field stacked with the stale and the dour.

So why are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney having such a tough time in the presidential race?

Here's a theory: because they're boomers.

At least in part, the senator from Illinois and the former Massachusetts governor have not gained national traction because they both give off the scent of excessive narcissism that has been turning off scores of Silent Generation elders and Gen-X juniors throughout the Me Generation's political ascendance.

It's surprising that more hasn't been made of the link between voter dissatisfaction with their 2008 choices and the preponderance of boomers on both parties' ballots. Of the 15 "major" candidates, only seven -- Democrats Chris Dodd and Joe Biden and Republicans Fred Thompson, John McCain, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani -- were born before the boom exploded in 1946. When Biden or McCain scold their boomer rivals for self-serving doubletalk and situational ethics, they're channeling the frustrations of many with boom-generation politicians.

Consider Obama's response when a reporter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, asked him last month why he stopped wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. He'd had one right after Sept. 11, 2001, he said, but as the country lurched toward an invasion of Iraq, he began to see the pin as "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Instead of sullying his suit coat with what apparently now was a reprehensible symbol of reckless militarism, Obama said he was "going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."

Unsurprisingly, the right wing pounced, framing Pingate as yet another example of knee-jerk left-wing contempt for the national symbol. Even ABC's George Stephanopoulos noted that "it probably appeals to some in the Democratic base who are very much antiwar, but it could limit his gains further on down the road."

Why would Obama damage himself this way just to make a debatable rhetorical point more suitable for a Georgetown cocktail party than a post-9/11 political campaign? After all, he has seemed more alert than most to simmering anti-boomer sentiment, cultivating an image as a generational change-agent skillfully enough to persuade pundit Andrew Sullivan to write in the Atlantic that "he could take America -- finally -- past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation."

But Obama is afflicted with the same boomer reflexes that Romney displayed when an Iowa voter asked him why his five sons hadn't enlisted in the military to pursue the foreign policy goals he so effusively praises. "One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected, because they think I'd be a great president," he told the Associated Press. His 36-year-old son Josh, Romney said, had performed an especially patriotic service by stumping for Dad across Iowa in an RV. Voters nationwide still haven't stopped shaking their heads over that one.

These widely ridiculed paeans to flag-free patriotism and Winnebago nationalism are examples of a disturbing trend in boomer political culture: the instinctive substitution of personal ego and self-aggrandizement for pragmatic judgment and civic accountability. Obama wants voters to believe that he's the antidote to the right-leaning Beltway groupthink that got us into Iraq. But he eagerly indulged in left-leaning posturing on a topic he had to know was a political land mine. At least Romney eventually apologized for his gaffe. Still, he expects the electorate to see his close-knit family as an allegory for his presumably inspired leadership. But he had no decent answer to a question as obvious as why his sons weren't serving in the war he so loudly backs.

No wonder these me-oriented candidacies leave so many voters cold. Obama and Romney are just the latest in a string of boom-era political leaders who've run afoul of a favorite boomer slogan: "The personal is political."

That phrase originally referred to the feminist conviction that political and cultural forces have more impact on the course of our lives than do our personalities and individual decisions. But growing up in the 1960s and '70s in Cambridge, Mass., a greenhouse of boomer political identity, I saw that bumper sticker saying take on a more narcissistic meaning.

For my boomer peers, believing that the center of the universe looks back at us from the mirror every morning, it was a green light to let our gut feelings and personal biases -- often mistaken for moral principles -- dictate our civic behavior. We used it to justify a new brand of politics that values personal identity over communal interests, all the while insisting that they're one and the same.

In the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts, exotic concepts of discrimination with made-up names such as "lookism" (discrimination against the unattractive) and "heteronorming" (social insistence on heterosexual behavior) got their start from "the personal is political" and its comforting premise that if you believe strongly enough in your own oppression, it must be real. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was seized upon with messianic zeal by both left- and right-wing boomers eager to impose their moral code. Communal symbols such as Old Glory have been exploited during the boomer era by both warmongers who wrap themselves in it and antiwar zealots who turn it into a dungaree jacket iron-on.

All this was keenly observed by none other than the college-age Obama. "Politics was no longer simply a pocketbook issue but a moral issue as well," he recalls of the late 1970s in his book "The Audacity of Hope." "Politics was decidedly personal, insinuating itself into every interaction."

Over the years, the elevation of self at the expense of consensus, compromise and community has given us a string of unwanted gifts: the squandered second term of Bill Clinton; the voter-repelling posturing and sighing of Al Gore; and the Jesus-made-me-do-it follies of the Bush years.

In my home state, where boomer elites carry John F. Kennedy's exhortation that "the torch has been passed to a new generation" tattooed over their hearts, the flame is fueled by narcissistic political behavior. Kennedy urged us to place community over self-interest, but featherbedding, pension-fattening and resistance to reform are staples of Massachusetts political culture.

Boomer pols of both parties paid homage to environmentalism, smart growth and careful stewardship of the public dollar. Then they collaborated on Boston's scandalous Big Dig highway project, an obscenely expensive monument to boomer overreach and misplaced priorities that soaked taxpayers for billions without solving the city's traffic woes. At one point, more than a third of the project's cost was for "mitigation" payments to clever boomer developers, pols and environmental groups who alertly threatened lawsuits if they didn't get their slice. Boomer builders' bragging about what they liked to call "the greatest public works project in the history of the world" abated only after a woman was crushed in her car by a tunnel collapse in 2006.

In Massachusetts, the runaway hubris of boomer political elites is a nightmarish sight in the rearview mirror of thousands of working-class citizens who have fled in search of good jobs, affordable housing and superior public education. A state that was once a mecca for the young has led the nation in population loss twice in this decade. And the outlook is little brighter in red states such as Kansas, where conservative boomer leaders seem just as unable to find pragmatic real-world answers.

It's a cliche that the boomer voters who call the shots in elections are always on the lookout for something fresh and trendy. Central-casting boomers Obama and Romney imagine themselves meeting that need, as does the YouTube primper John Edwards. Yet it's balding, grumpy 63-year-old Rudy Giuliani who leads the GOP pack. It's 72-year-old Ron Paul who's setting Internet fundraising records. And 71-year-old John McCain is showing some life in the polls on the strength of an ad campaign that draws explicit comparison with the self-indulgent Woodstock generation. And atop the Democratic field, there's early-wave boomer Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose flag-pin-wearing moderation, however calculated, apparently seems more mature to voters than Obama's pandering to the left.

After 16 years of a Me Generation White House, could it be that voters, desperate for leadership that's less personal and more presidential, are likely to turn to what they see as more reliable retro models, shipping the flashy boomer merchandise back to the store? After all, when a country traumatized by terrorism and war is confronted with superficial candidates who tout their pristine lapels and casualty-free households as selling points, the torch clearly has been passed. And it turns out it's a lava lamp.