Talkin' 'Bout My New Generation
Barack Obama says the baby boomers' time has passed. Many voters seem to agree with him–so far
Presidential scholar Robert Dallek, a biographer of President Kennedy, told U.S. News that Obama's talk about generational change is "very shrewd. He's making a connection to Kennedy, and Kennedy also represented a new generation–young, vital, dynamic, very bright, articulate, and upbeat, a new face on the scene. What also serves Obama well is the tremendous frustration and disappointment with Bush."
Dallek points out that Obama additionally offers a new version of the African-American story: "He's not part of the slave history. He is part of the immigrant experience. This gives him a different image for many people."
And there certainly is a market for change. Sixty-nine percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country, according to the latest Gallup Poll. Seventy-four percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. President Bush's job-approval ratings are hovering at about 35 percent.
Says Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who advised independent presidential candidate Ross Perot in 1992: "Everyone can see themselves in Obama. ... He is the definition of the American dream, the definition of the American promise." Conservatives see him as clean-cut and businesslike, Luntz says, while moderates see him as a problem solver. Liberals see him as a man from a multicultural background who breaks down racial and other barriers.
Still, Obama has a long way to go. Most Americans have no idea what he stands for. And if he fails to quickly flesh out his own agenda, he will open himself up to charges that, with only two years in the Senate and no national security background, he is too inexperienced and superficial to be president just yet.
Some political veterans are reminded of former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart's insurgent challenge to ex-Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984. Campaigning on themes of new ideas and a new generation, Hart won the New Hampshire Democratic primary but then faded after Mondale began mocking him with the slogan of a hamburger chain: "Where's the beef?" The same question might be asked of Obama–a point made by Hart in his recent review of Obama's book in the New York Times. Noting that Obama's book lacks a "strategic sense," Hart observes that "the media age has been known, as he wisely recognizes, to devour what it doth create."
Melting pot. But the freshman Democrat has some things going for him that Hart lacked. For one, Senator Clinton isn't as popular among rank-and-file Democrats as Mondale was at the time. For another, Obama's biography is more compelling than Hart's. Born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, he is the son of a black father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., from Kenya (he is named after his dad), and a white mother, Ann Dunham, from Kansas. He identifies himself more with the immigrant's experience widely shared by countless millions of Americans than with the heritage of slavery and African-American oppression that has been shared by prominent black politicians at the national level, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
And Obama is an achiever. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard Law School (where he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review), practiced civil rights law in Chicago, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for a decade. He served in the Illinois state Senate for eight years and became a sensation when he delivered a dramatic call for conciliation in the keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He is now the fifth African-American to have served in the U.S. Senate–and the only black there now. He and his wife have two daughters, Malia, 8, and Sasha, 5.
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