Bai's Re-Argument

» NYT: Back-Room Choices (Matt Bai)

A pretty solid article here by Matt Bai, nominally on the aspect of generational politics as it's playing out in this go-round. Then again, it's hard to go wrong with me when you include the term "Atari Democrats" in a news article.

Money clip here:

In this new world, who is to say that the party's superdelegates would still vote as the reliable instruments of the Democratic establishment? And even if they did, who is to say that other Democrats would tolerate a nomination brokered by a bunch of insiders? In the blog age, such events would likely turn the party upside down.

There is a more fundamental way in which the comparison with 1984 underscores a transition taking place in American life. Hart, who was 47 then, was one of the first politicians reared in the years after the Great Depression to come pounding on the clubhouse door of an entrenched generation. Having been born almost a decade before American soldiers returned from Italy and Iwo Jima, Hart wasn't technically a baby boomer, but he had been shaped more by Selma and Saigon than by Pearl Harbor, and his were the voters raised on "Abbey Road." The shorting-out of his electrifying campaign against the party establishment -- along with its brief but tragic sequel four years later, ended by allegations of adultery -- presaged all that came next in American politics: trivialization and scandal, the politicizing of personal lives, the hardening of cultural divisions that had their origins on campuses like Berkeley and Kent State.

Win or lose, Obama represents the next generational incursion. He is, by definition, a late boomer, having made the cutoff by about three years, but temperamentally he belongs to what the writer Douglas Coupland branded Generation X, the first wave of Americans to come of age politically after Watergate. He was 6 when Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; 14 when "Saturday Night Live" first came on the air; 19 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. For those of us Obama's age and younger, the formative events of the 1960s, the enmities and shared experiences that defined the next 40 years of American politics, are as much a part of history as the Treaty of Versailles; we weren't shaped by this constant sense of political Armageddon. (Perhaps this is the underlying reason that Obama's recent comments about Reagan as a transformational president -- comments similar to those once made by Bill Clinton himself -- proved so easily exploited by the Clinton camp; Obama wasn't around, politically, for that era, and this lack of shared experience very likely bothers a lot of older Democrats more than his lack of actual governing experience.)

What I find most interesting in that analysis is that it actually begins to explain my own rationale for supporting Hillary over Obama. I should share with Andrew Sullivan a revelling in this potential post-Vietnam moment that Obama represents, but instead I find greater comfort in the more identifiable policy views of Hillary Clinton. I may be, by at least some estimations still, "young-ish" ... but I got started early. Early enough to have been rather highly absorbed in the argument (or, for Bai fans, "Argument 0.9") that led to the rise of the DLC and Bill Clinton, institutions that I still regard very highly. Obviously, I see the first Clinton administration as a highwater mark in many regards. And I've yet to conclude that a second Clinton administration wouldn't lead to much of the same decision-making, with less of the second-rate decision-making process that tagged along in the 90s.

There's a side of me that would love to cheer on the burying of the Vietnam-generation's influence on policy and there's ample reason to believe that Obama might be the one to do that. But there's still an uncertainty that's attached to that bargain. At least in my view.