05-24-2016, 11:40 AM
(05-24-2016, 12:41 AM)Dan Wrote: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/
Quote:Ten years ago, a writer named Barack Obama recalled his fatigue with Baby Boomer politics, as epitomized by the battles in the 1990s between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections:
"I sometimes felt,’’ he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."
Two years later, Obama personally ended a 16-year Boomer lock on the presidency. His campaign emphasis on consensus, dialogue and pragmatism seemed to rebuke the Boomer tendencies personified by his predecessors, Clinton and George W. Bush.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/
Obama was a cusper though, and had as many boomer qualities himself as he had Xer ones.
I'm not sure in the end there was much difference. Was Bill Clinton really rooted in revenge plots and old grudges? Did he refer to these in his rhetoric while president? It seems to me he was even more of a compromiser than Obama, and that his attitude while in the White House was cheerful and pragmatic and that he sought consensus all the time. Even George W Bush, if anything, said even more to rebuke boomers (centered on his own personal "changes") than Obama did in his book, and he didn't deliberately stir up that many resentments either in his rhetoric. It was his policies that were polarizing, particularly bringing back the military-industrial complex and constant unnecessary war, the same policies that boomers protested against in the 60s. And it was those who attacked Bill Clinton (rather than Clinton himself) who exhibited the revenge and grudge politics which Obama mentioned in his book. And those who did that attack on Bill were as often members of older generations as they were boomers. Remember Bob Dole's attack on Bill that "his generation had never done anything real." Pure late-1960s anti-boomer rhetoric by a typical GI gen member.
