Obama is the first Gen X Presidential candidate — for better and for worse.
He’s the son of a baby boomer — his mother, Anne, was born in 1942 — and although his birth in 1961 puts him slightly ahead of the textbook mid-1960s start date of Gen X, he is the same age as the man who coined the term “Generation X,” author Douglas Coupland.
Like many Gen Xers, Obama is a child of divorce. His anthropologist mother embodied the restless drift and countercultural curiosity of the baby boomer generation. His grandparents’ lives were more typical of the “greatest generation” — with struggles through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, followed by a more conventional, even conservative, life.
His mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon — Barack tried to bridge the divide.
Reconciling these generational tensions has been the unwelcome responsibility of Gen X. We have been living in the wake of the Boomers all our lives. We’ve benefited from the civil rights struggles and enjoyed the opening of our culture, from rock music to the sexual revolution.
But we’ve also experienced the fallout from their excesses — drug abuse, racial strife, fractured families, homelessness, AIDS, a decaying environment and dangerous inner cities. Gen Xers have been left to clean up after the Baby Boomers’ party, to put up with the societal growing pains, and try to reconcile the warring factions.
The youth vote came out in force in 2004. It will especially so this election cycle. As we go into this day – will it be enough? Will Gen X and Gen Y turn the page on on the last 30 years of politics by division?
Here’s to hoping. I think so. But if the numbers aren’t there – McCain wins.
There’s something special taking place in America – whether we realize it or not – it is the hand-off (or wrenching off) of national political representation from the Boomer generation to Generation-X.
GenX was labeled early on by Boomers as the “Baby-bust” generation. A generation supposedly filled with nothing more than slackers, know-nothings, non-participants, and materialists. We were the first generation in many to have to make due with “less” than our generational precedents.
Even as this moment approaches, the press still takes part in labeling Gen-X, the Ignored Generation.
These characterizations of long been proven false. Look around you – Google, Craigslist, Microsoft, Apple, YouTube, eBay, Amazon.com – all founded by members of GenX. The Netroots movement? Same.
“In 2000, there was this realization for people my age: Hell, there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans. George Bush proved that,” Armstrong says. It was also clear that the only force that could stop the Bush bandwagon was, for better or worse, the Democratic Party. Third parties were no longer the answer — even though many X-ers had voted for Ralph Nader in the past — and X-ers had never embraced street protests like the boomers. So they turned to the medium most of them knew best: the Internet.
If George Bush introduced X-ers to the value of partisanship, the Internet offered something just as valuable in the jittery aftermath of 9/11: community. “It’s easy to forget how amazing this felt back then. But for many of us there was a feeling of being lost and politically isolated,” Armstrong says. The feeling was not limited to X-ers, but they were a generation that had long been defined by an aversion to groups. “It was more anti-fake community,” says Armstrong. “We didn’t like being controlled or defined by an association with these fake communities like nationality, or religion or [corporate] brands.” The Internet always carried the potential for connection, but X-ers would use it to create a vast array of political and purely social blogs, networking sites and other forms of community, which we now refer to as Web 2.0.
As the “stolen” elections were quickly followed by 9/11, its aftermath and then the invasion of Iraq, X-ers were uniquely situated to create a new form of activism that blended technology with political resistance. “The Millennials were too young to be heavily into politics at the time,” says Armstrong. “But we also understood the technology in a way that baby boomers did not.” X-ers were better able to develop the potential of online activism — from raising money to organizing meet-ups — having been present and intimately involved in the development of the web during the dot-com heyday. To be clear, the X-ers are not the netroots — which includes progressives of all ages — but they are indisputably its creators.
So lets be clear – while Boomers may have invented much of it – the information revolution – the Internet’s astounding growth and establishment into the mainstream of the world – is driven by the passions, aspirations and yes – ideals – of GenX. Likewise it will be Generation Y who determine what the Internet will ultimately mean for society as a whole.
So what are these so called ideals and how do they apply to Obama for President?
First, lets get something out of the way real fast – all GenXers are honorary pre-World Series Winning Phillies Philadelphians. Listen to Jeff Gordinier, author of “X Saves the World” talking about his initial reaction to hearing Obama at the 2004 convention:
I remember when my wife and I saw the Democratic National Convention on TV in 2004, and Obama spoke, and I was crying. Shit. I mean, real tears. I cried. I was like, “Fuck! What’s happening? This guy’s awesome!” My wife said, “I’d follow this guy anywhere. I’d vote for this guy. Who is this guy?” It was just a remarkable speech. And then we thought, “We’ll get burned. We’ll get burned. Let’s face it. Don’t believe in this. You know, he’s a cool guy, but let’s not get all full of hope or anything. Hope is a trick.”
Tell me fellow Philadelphians and GenXers, don’t you relate?
Now its one thing to say you are afraid of embracing Hope and quite another to say you don’t stand behind what you want to stand behind.
In Philly we have (had) a proud tradition of supporting our teams right up to the end, even though part of us holds out on being sappy fans that exclaim “it will be okay – we’ll win if we believe”. Because we think we know better. There is a hard earned pragmatism here. When Tug McGraw told Philly “You Gotta Believe” it was a challenge to most Philadelphians.
Rocky Balboa said “It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can GET hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep – moving – forward” – that’s Philadelphians for you. You take a smack, shake it off with a “whatever” and keep on keepin’ on.
That describes GenX pretty well too when you think about it. In the face of so much negative information heaped on it about its future, our reaction is to not panic, to recognize the world will still be here tomorrow, that if you are hearing a message from someplace, you are, more than likely, being sold a bill of goods.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are GenXers. Think about that and what it reflects upon our relationship to media.
Back in 1999 Ted Halstead in The Atlantic wrote of the political voice of GenX:
Whatever this voice may be, it does not fit comfortably within existing partisan camps. “The old left-right paradigm is not working anymore,” according to the novelist Douglas Coupland, who coined the term “Generation X.” Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have written extensively on generational issues, have argued in these pages that from the Generation X perspective “America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again.” If Xers have any ideology, it is surely pragmatism. In an attempt to be more specific Coupland has claimed, “Coming down the pipe are an extraordinarily large number of fiscal conservatives who are socially left.” The underlying assumption here is that the Xer political world view stems simplistically from a combination of the 1960s social revolution and the 1980s economic revolution. This kind of thinking has led some to describe young adults as a generation of libertarians, who basically want government out of their bedrooms and out of their pocketbooks. As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.
To say that Xers are fiscal conservatives is to miss half the economic story; the other and equally powerful force at play can best be described as economic populism. In fact, the Xer consensus represents a novel hybrid of two distinct currents of economic thought that have rarely combined in the history of American politics. It might well be called “balanced-budget populism.”
…Fiscal prudence, economic populism, social investment, campaign reform, shared sacrifice, and environmental conservation — this constellation of beliefs transcends the existing left-right spectrum. It should be immediately apparent that this generation’s voice is not represented by any of the established leaders or factions in the political mainstream. And Xers seem to recognize as much — 61 percent agree with the statement “Politicians and political leaders have failed my generation.” So how would American politics change if the voice of Generation X were suddenly heard?
If we parse these three paragraphs we can see the call from our generation for a Barrak Obama.
Lets break it down.
Addressing the the Boomer driven Liberal-Conservative war
Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America–finally–past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly–and uncomfortably–at you.
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war–not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade–but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war–and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama–and Obama alone–offers the possibility of a truce.
Being a pragmatist when it comes to economic policy
So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s simple call for less government and lower taxes.
He paused for a few seconds and then said this:
“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.
“Now, that’s the story. Now, telling it elegantly — ‘low taxes, smaller government’ — the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.”
Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.
The final argument for the presidency of Barack Obama is the enormous competence he has shown in running his campaign. He has demonstrated unprecedented ability to motivate people, to gather support for his vision and his programs, and to surround himself with people who can execute on that vision. For the past two years, he’s managed what you could easily think of as the fastest growing and best-funded startup in America, and as CEO of that startup, he’s come through with flying colors.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
“This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
GenX recognizes sales pitches from 500 meters away. To say that this election is not about the issues – that it is about personality is a dodge to sell something. My bet is we’re not going to fall for it. That GenX is part of the reality based community. That’s where we live and breathe.
“Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done. Today we are called once more–and it is time for our generation to answer that call,” declared Barack Obama, uttering the word “generation” no fewer than thirteen times in his speech announcing his intention to run for President. There is no mistaking his campaign theme: it’s time for the old to move over and make way for the new.
New site design! I finally got around to upgrading my templates to the latest and greatest in Movable Type.
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This led to me changing my URL design significantly. Previously, I had used entry_id as each post’s slug value, which wasn’t optimal, SEO-wise, or for file system management (having over a thousand files in a directory is rarely a good idea), so URLs are now based upon post titles, as is the default of most MT sites. This forced me to find a means to redirect the old pages. A .htaccess file with 2500 entries didn’t sound like a good idea. Instead, using a .htaccess file in the old design’s weblog/kmartino/archive directory, I mapped .shtml to PHP. I then modified the templates of the old design to output some PHP that wrote the appropriate response header to do 301 redirects to the new URL each page would reside in. Seems to work well.
I like the default MT look and feel for now. I’ll tweak latter to re-add some things I miss from the old design later, plus add some new sugar like pagination in my monthly and category archives.
