I’ve been inspired to write by the victory of Barack Obama in Iowa (which I believe could be his first step towards the White House), and what it says about my generation. I’ve been a fan of Obama’s for quite some time now, I find him an inspiring candidate who, though perhaps prone to speaking in glittering generalities, strikes me as someone who can truly rise above the partisanship to get things done for America. It’s the kind of leadership America needs at this point in History, after the divisiveness of the Bush Administration.
We’ve all seen the numbers coming out of Iowa:
http://www.groupnewsblog.net/...
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Total Voter Turnout (approximate): 356,000
Percentage of total vote
24.5% Obama
20.5% Edwards
19.8% Clinton
11.4% Huckabee (R)
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The vote total for people participating in the Iowa caucuses was almost 65% for Democrats, surely a bad sign for the Republicans if there ever was one... And the winner on the Republican side was Mike Huckabee, a man not supported by the Republican establishment because of his record of raising taxes and beliefs that government ought to actually act to help a struggling middle class.
In short, Iowa saw the last gasp of modern Reagan conservatism, trickle down economics. People have heard the message that if only the rich were richer, we’d all be better off, and they are no longer buying it... And the "Christian Conservatives", a group made up of largely rural, highly religious, under educated and largely poor voting block that the Bush camp ruthlessly exploited by paying lip service to some issues they cared about like gay marriage and abortion while stabbing them in the back on economic issues, rejected the phony Mitt Romney in favor of one of their own in Mike Huckabee... The marriage made in heaven (or hell, depending on your point of view) ended in divorce in Iowa...
But none of that really explains why Barack Obama was able to do what he has done. After all, all three Democratic candidates represented to varying degrees a move away from conservative economic policies. But Barack Obama was able to do something different, something that for a long time the punditocracy said couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be done...
He brought young people to the polls.
I think his win was the first strike in a generational battle, being waged against the spoiled, self-important baby-boomer generation who failed in their own drug induced attempts at revolution in the 60’s and 70’s, whose best instincts brought us Bill Clinton and worst brought us George W. Bush, by my generation, long derided as cynical slackers by the generations which preceded us... Hillary Clinton was the Boomers candidate, so self-obsessed with her own power and legacy that she doesn’t seem to understand what another Clinton campaign would do to the political landscape of this country.
Yes, it’s true Barack Obama, born in 1961 is still technically a baby boomer, but I’m more than willing to make him into an honorary Gen X’er for what he’s managed to do for the discourse in this country. And I believe my generation will in turn do for him what the Boomers were unable to do for Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. If we do, I think it will say something profound about both generations.
Our generation has been tagged by our Baby Boomer parents as apathetic and cynical as opposed to their idealism and activism, and yet, for all their self absorbed rhetoric, what did they ever give us? They went from feckless revolutionaries in the 70’s and 80’s to self-absorbed yuppies in the 80’s and 90’s, always ultimately paying more attention to their own materialistic and hedonistic desires than the causes that they supposedly supported.
They elected Ronald Reagan, who promised them during their prime money making years that they owed nothing to anyone else, not to the parents who raised them nor to the children that they produced. They increased the deficits to record amounts because to their mind they deserved to spend that money, regardless of what it did to my Generation. Then, when one of their own finally took the reigns in the form of Bill Clinton, a man I genuinely admire and respect, he allowed his generational tendencies towards hedonism ultimately undermine the idealistic goals that his administration represented.
Finally, we got George W. Bush, the ultimate representation of privilege and selfishness, of impetuousness and hubris and greed that represent the worst instincts of the Boomer Generation. Little more needs to be said about that...
After seeing all of this, perhaps it should not come as a shock that my generation is more than a little cynical, but at the same time we aren’t so cynical that we aren’t willing to rise to the challenge that our Boomer parents left us. And we aren’t so jaded that we are unwilling to hear the message of hope and promise that Barack Obama offers. While our parents begin to enter their retirement, now coming to find themselves poorly prepared and forced to rely on the very same public services they attacked during Reagan’s time, they too will look to us to solve the problems that their generation helped to create.
And with the hopeful leadership of people like Barack Obama, I believe that my generation can and will meet that challenge.