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Baby Boomers as the Moses Generation, Obama as Joshua
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AP photo: Barack Obama savors victory
Demographers conveniently lump Baby Boomers into a span of years from 1946 to 1964. But that's where their common ground ends.
The leading age Baby Boomers, who are 62 this year, have little in common with the trailing edge Boomers, who are 44, and the division was no more pronounced than during the long, long presidential campaign that ended yesterday with the election of Democrat Barack Obama.
The Democrat from Illinois succeeds 16 years of Boomer presidents -- Bill Clinton for eight years followed by George Bush's eight years.
Demographically, Obama is a Baby Boomer, born in 1961 (three years before the 1964 demographic boundary of the Boomer generation), but he has made pains throughout his career to distance himself from a generation that he believes hasn't been able to get over itself and is responsible for the political impasses of recent years.
He and other trailing edge Boomers don't have a lot in common with the Boomer elders.
Consider:
-- The leading edge came of age at the birth of rock in the 1960s and '70s and with the British Invasion -- and we're talking Beatles and Rolling Stones here, not Redcoats. The trailing edge came of musical age in the 1980s with The Police, The Fixx and Air Supply;
-- The leading edge Boomer will remember where he or she was when they heard that John F. Kennedy was shot. The youngest Boomers in 1963 were a) either too young to remember or b) weren't born yet;
-- The older Boomer had to deal with the prospect of being drafted into the military. For the younger Boomer, the draft was gone by the time he would have to worry about it;
-- The oldest of the Baby Boomers probably are an empty nesters or soon will be. The youngest of the Baby Boomers still have birds in the nest;
-- The oldest Boomer is now collecting Social Security. The youngest Boomer considers Social Security and retirement the furthest thing from their mind as they raise their families.
Obama ran against the generation almost as much as he ran against his opponents, first in the Democratic primaries then in the presidential campaign against Republican John McCain.
"I think there's no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Senator Clinton can't deliver on and part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they've been fighting some of the same fights since the '60's and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done," he said in a speech in Iowa during the primaries in 2007.
He had expressed a similar sentiment in his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
This generation within a generation rift is being characterized by some culturalists as the Boomers and Generation Jones.
But a more lyric description is the Moses Generation and the Joshua Generation.
This description was brought to character by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais -- who explained it best in a Washingtonpost.com piece from early this year. They described a speech that Obama gave in Selma, Ala., in which he delineated the Boomer generation from the one that followed, the Millennials. The Boomers, Obama told the crowd, were the "Moses generation" that led the children of Israel out of slavery; the Millennials were the "Joshua generation" that established the kingdom of Israel.
"The first was a generation of idealists and dreamers," wrote Winograd and Hais, "the second a generation of doers and builders."
History, they said, shows an 80-year cycle in which a civic generation like the Millennials emerges to recreate the country after the upheaval caused by the generation of idealists.
While he's not a Millennial either and while he disdains a Baby Boomer label, he certainly will be the character of a Joshua, a doer.
And there is no more a symbolic shift from Moses to Joshua than Grant Park in Chicago, where Obama gave his victory speech. To the older Boomer, Grant Park represents the idealism of the 1960s, the site of the riotous and bloody confrontations during the divisive 1968 Democratic National Convention.
The whole world is watching. Indeed.
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