Antero Pietila
2008-03-05 08:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

This year’s fiercely contested presidential primaries are harbingers of a political realignment with the potential to be as fundamental as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition allying city machines, labor unions, minorities, liberal farm groups, intellectuals and the South.

This is the thesis of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics,” one of a slew of books to attempt to explain the Barack Obama phenomenon. The Illinois senator had not yet registered on the national scene when Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais submitted their analysis to Rutgers University Press. So instead of charting the meteoric rise of a single candidate, they describe demographic forces likely to alter the political landscape.

Other new books deal with the same phenomena, including Kelli Goff’s “Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.” What distinguishes Winograd and Hais are the compelling academic studies, exit polls and survey results they marshal to support their thesis: Americans born between 1982 and 2003 are in the driver’s seat.

“By 2012 the first half of the entire Millennial Generation, approximately 42 million young Americans, will be eligible to vote. The history of political realignments suggests that the realignment shaped in 2008 by this generation’s oldest members will be confirmed and solidified when whoever is elected that year runs for re-election,” the authors write. “Just as FDR’s landslide victory in 1936 made the Democrats the dominant power in American politics for another 30 years, so too will the party that captures the White House in 2008 have a historic opportunity to become the majority party for at least four more decades.”

If this seems like good news to Obama, it is because he has captured the Millennial Generation’s imagination and understands the use of the revolutionary social networking and communications tools linking members of this large and diverse demographic group. Other candidates are playing catch-up — unsuccessfully so far.

This is particularly bad news for Republicans. “The tendency of most Millennials to identify with the Democratic Party has severely aged the Republican base, threatening the party’s chances for success in future elections,” Winograd and Hais write.

They recount the histories of previous political realignments. The New Deal realignment, for example, started in 1928, when the nomination of Al Smith — a Roman Catholic, who did not win the presidency — brought southern and Eastern European immigrants into a new Democratic coalition solidified in 1936. Similarly, the starting point of the Republican realignment leading to the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon started four years earlier, when five Deep South states voted for Republican Barry M. Goldwater.

As they contrast different generations, Winograd and Hais make a startling assertion: Millennials, the children of baby boomers and Gen-Xers, are more like their grandparents and great-grandparents, members of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” They are civic-minded, yearning to be activated.

“Millennials are the largest and most racially diverse generation of Americans ever,” the book states. “About 40 percent of Millennials are of African-American, Latin American, Asian, or racially mixed backgrounds, compared to 25 percent of the two next older generations. Twenty percent of Millennials have at least one parent who is an immigrant.”

The transformational Greatest Generation, too, was diverse. Although 90 percent white, those immigrants and children of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe also craved a constructive role.

“Because of the sheer size of the Millennial Generation and its greater facility with new information and communications technologies, their attitudes and beliefs will overwhelm defenders of the status quo and reshape American politics for decades to come,” Winograd and Hais predict.

This is something to think about.

Antero Pietila is a Baltimore Examiner columnist. He can be reached at hap5905@hotmail.com