"As a boy, Clinton saw the story of Rosa Parks, and moved to the back seat

The Last Hurrah
The baby boomers tacked left, then right. Where will their politics go in the golden years? The 'I want it all and I want it now' crowd confronts its hardest campaigns.



By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Jan. 23, 2006 issue - When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his campaign-trail theme was the exuberant Fleetwood Mac anthem "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Fourteen years later, that "tomorrow" has arrived for the first baby-boomer president: he turns 60 in August. If he had a song these days, it might be Bob Dylan's wistful hymn "Forever Young." Heart surgery has left Clinton pallid and gaunt, and deepened the hint of melancholy that always lay beneath the surface of his preacherly style. He keeps busy, of course, with charitable work on tsunami and hurricane relief and AIDS in Africa, with global A-list parties and conferences, with kibitzing in back rooms on the nascent presidential candidacy of his wife, Hillary.

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But what broadcast television gave—unity, self-confidence and idealism—it could also take away. As teens and as college students, boomers watched fiery racial battles, assassinations, nightmarish dangers in Vietnam and, finally, the corruption at the pinnacle of public life. The images were so searing for a paradoxical reason: they were mostly vicarious, filtered through the heightening, simplifying (oversimplifying) lens of the media. The result: a generation wary of war and suspicious of political authority, assuming that politics was a conspiratorial struggle of "movements"—whether liberal, radical or conservative. As a boy, Clinton saw the story of Rosa Parks, and moved to the back seat of the bus. Bush once said that he understood the divisions of society in the '60s because he had seen them on TV. He wasn't being ironic.

But if the boomers were watching their history closely, they weren't always learning its lessons. Look at the grade transcript. Steeped in the failures of the Vietnam War, the boomers nevertheless produced a president who has led the country into what many regard as another Vietnam-like quagmire. The first generation to make the environment a political cause, the boomers also hoarded every SUV and electronic gadget they could get their hands on. They championed tolerance and creativity—a brave, lasting achievement—but Clinton turned their devotion to personal freedom into a sordid Oval Office farce. That gave Bush—an exemplar of boomer feel-goodism before he sobered up at 40—the chance to play the scold at the Republican convention six years ago. "Our generation," Bush declared, "has a chance to show that we have grown up before we grow old."

Far from being monolithically "liberal," the boomer generation's political story is about two youth movements in competition—each inspired by "freedom," but by differing interpretations and strategies for protecting it. Yale had deep roots in both camps. Indeed, it was instrumental in creating both camps. The conservative bastion was in Yale College. Its credo: devotion to free markets, anti-communism, government service and traditional social arrangements. Its avatar was Bill Buckley (class of '50). When Bush was there, he was not only president of his college fraternity, but of the Inter-Fraternity Council. "George was for torture then, too—of the pledge class," joked one of his college classmates.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10855757/site/newsweek/