And they called me crazy when I said this was a generational thing.
Hillary is watching her support wane from just about every demographic, and her campaign is desperately clinging to every vote it can for survival. She’s still strong among working class whites, especially women, and older voters. Fair enough. But compared to Barack’s rock-star-like popularity among younger voters, who are registering, donating, and volunteering in record numbers, there just won’t be enough to make up the difference. She’s tried making the case over and over again that she can represent the interests of the "youth", using (for lack of a more colorful term) Chelsea’s bland popularity to appeal to sororities and youth organizations across the country. She has even managed to generate a kind of muted enthusiasm among young women, who are truly torn between the possibility of electing a woman, a gender-affirming act, and being drawn into the decidedly male but alluringly charismatic circle of Barack Obama’s social movement disguised as a political campaign.
And then Bill Clinton had to open his big mouth and, essentially, declare a generational war.
A strong term, perhaps, but that’s what it is going to amount to. When Hillary claimed that Barack had insulted working-class, small town voters by asserting that they turned to religion and the right to bear arms when they were abandoned by their political leadership, she may have had a minor point. Some people in rural Pennsylvania, under intense media scrutiny, have admitted that Barack’s speech put them off. At most he alienated a few thousand rural Pennsylvanians who were looking for an excuse not to vote for him any way. But Bill . . . Bill out-right insulted two generations of Democrats by asserting that they were being led astray by Obama . . . because they’re too stupid.
He did it in a back-handed way, by suggesting that the age split was due to the "wisdom" of older voters (read: Boomers), and their unwillingness to be told that there were few functional differences between the Clinton Administration and its bracketing Bush Administrations, but there is no denying his implication. Gen Xers and those who come after them are young, foolish, and easily led.
Hillary accused Barack of being elitist – this is down-right condescending, insulting, and, unfortunately, absolutely typical of his generation. I know I’m going to take yet more heat from Boomers over this – I understand that there are wide exceptions to every generational rule – but Bill’s "We Know Best" attitude is the kind of paternalistic condescension that my generation has been force-fed all of our lives by the Boomers, and were sick to fucking death of it.
In case it has escaped the notice of Mark Penn and his fellow pollsters, one of the nuanced reasons that the "youth" (anyone under 50, apparently) have flocked to Barack Obama’s campaign is that his candidacy represents a paradigm shift in American electoral politics. And to assume that our allegiance to Obama is somehow based on our lack of "mature wisdom" is a straight shot of 80 proof egotism with a cool, frosty pint of arrogance for a chaser.
Sure, Bill was just trying to rally the "Me Generation" troops by appealing to their vanity, and he probably thinks we whippersnappers shouldn’t take it seriously, but it’s an insult added to a lifetime of injury for us. Instead of being called "bitter", due to our economic woes, he’s calling us "foolish" because we don’t remember Woodstock. The difference is that people in rural Pennsylvania really are bitter, but us young ‘uns aren’t nearly as stupid as he says we are. A decade or two ago this wouldn’t have been any big deal. In the Age of the Internet (built by the exploitation of largely GenX and Gen Y creative genius) such crap is insidiously viral. And part of the problem is that in Bill Clinton’s world, the only "viral" issue is herpes prevention. His stab couldn’t have been phrased more deliberately than if he had bellowed out "Don’t Trust Anyone Under 50!" with the leadership of the nation.
Does he forget that his "wiser" Boomers elected two Bushes and a Reagan? That his generation of congressional leadership has essentially rubber-stamped the systematic dismantling of our precious Republic and the rule of law itself? Who are the fools, Mr. Clinton, and who are the wise? The sins of the folks "at a certain age" are piled high and deep, and the only way to avoid that fact is by a capitulation to self-serving intellectual dishonesty. Of course, I expect nothing less.
This is a generational civil war, now. There is a new "it" to get, and the Clintons don’t. And it’s not about The Black Guy. It’s about a lifetime of hearing how much better the Boomers are at everything, while we watched them piss away our birthright in a disastrous series of monumental policy blunders and head-shaking scandals. The entire rise of the Boomer political generation has been tainted with cynicism and a willingness to accept style over substance – as long as they get told how great they are. From the gas-hogging SUV to political Evangelical Christianity to cocaine and rehab to risky financial schemes to the HMO to the cynical foreign policies that reigned during both the Reagan/Bush/Bush regimes and the Clinton Administration, the Boomer legacy is one of myopic, self-centered focus on their own aggrandizement to the detriment of future generations. Yet they will be the first to scream their head off about a policy initiative because of "the children!".
The interests of our generations are different, but the Boomers can’t seem to get this through their heads. Sure, they want healthcare reform, for example, and they suddenly want it very badly as the icy fingers of death clutch towards their collective throat – and you can bet it will cover at least some elective cosmetic surgery. This generation feels entitled to the benefit that it will not have to pay for, so that they can cling on to life and haunt their great-grandchildren long past Nature’s expiration date (and look good doing it, too!).
Gen Xers et al want nationalized health-care, too, but because we are getting close to the point where the luxury of decent prenatal care is going to be something for the affluent, and working-class health insurance premiums and co-pays are going up faster than the pump price for premium gas, and the burden of managing the health-care needs of both our aging parents and our growing kids is becoming unbearable. We look at dealing with the Byzantine world of health insurance bureaucracy, the complex tangle of medical care and research, and the relatively happy way that every other Western democracy deals with health care and we know for a fact that it could be done better, cheaper, more effectively by using technology and targeted reforms. Only there are too many entrenched interests (those folks "of a certain age" Bill was speaking of) who jealously guard their prerogatives under the status quo and will mouth the slogans of reform while doing everything in their power to prevent it.
THAT’s where Bill has gone wrong. Because the "youth" are not following Obama because we’re stupid, or even foolish. We’re following him because someone has to lead us out of this hole that we’ve inherited, and after two Boomer presidents we figure the Boomers have had their shot at fixing the mess. We might not have any better luck with it, of course, but luckily one of our generational traits is a cast-iron bullshit detector. Gen Xers might suffer from cynicism at the personal level, but when it comes to our ideals – and the ideals of the generations who came after us – we’re pretty optimistic. We recognize that "our interests" are inexorably bound up with the interests of our descendents, and we are usually pretty willing to accept a sacrifice or two to make it happen. Our cynicism (and our bullshit-detection system) is largely directed at our leadership, who has promised us one thing and delivered another since we were "the children" ourselves.
While there is a certain type of wisdom that evolves when one has reached "a certain age", there is a whole separate kind of wisdom that arises when you have to learn how to survive and live in a world dominated by your egotistical and self-serving parents. Thanks, Bill, for putting that in perspective for us. We’re ready to vote, now.