Obama: A Baby Boomer not-wannabe

Barack Obama, U.S. Senate photo

Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boomer president, George Bush the second. If elected, will Barack Obama join the Boomer ranks as the third?

It depends on who’s defining who is and who isn’t a Baby Boomer. Demographers consider Obama part of the Baby Boom generation. But Obama doesn’t see himself as a Boomer. In fact, he's been trying to distance himself from that generation for a while.

In dissecting this issue we first have to agree on the definition of the Baby Boomer generation. Most demographers and the U.S. Census Bureau include anyone born between 1946 and 1964 as being members of the

Baby Boom generation or, as the Census Bureau, calls it the "baby-boom cohort."

But look up Baby Boom generation in Wikipedia and the bets start to hedge: "Baby boomer is a term used to describe a person who was born during the

Post-World War II baby boom between 1946 and the early 1960s."

The generational identification is clear for both Clinton and Bush -- Clinton born on Aug. 19, 1946 and Bush on July 6, 1946. Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961.

Their births illustrate the fact that as a generation the Baby Boomers have two distinct characteristics: the older Boomers, the empty nesters like Clinton and Bush, who are approaching retirement or have retired, and the younger boomers like Obama who are working and raising families.

Though he falls demographically into the Baby Boom era, Obama doesn't want to be there. As John Avlon, a former policy director for the Rudy Guiliani presidential campaign, wrote in Politico.com: "Obama is the first Gen X presidential candidate -- for better and for worse."

It's as if Obama watched the politics forged by Baby Boomers, and he not only didn't like what he saw, he promised himself he'd distance himself as far as he could from it.

“In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt 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,” Obama wrote in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," cited by Avlon in his Politic.com post.

Said Avlon: "His antidote is the rhetorical post-partisanship and professed belief in political pragmatism that are central to his political appeal amongst younger voters. His style of problem-solving — a cool assessment of the problems associated with predictable positions on both sides, and then an attempt to synthesize new solutions — fits Gen X perfectly."

Everything he's done -- from announcing his candidacy in an on-line video to texting his choice of Joe Biden as vice president -- has the texture of someone looking behind him in age, not forward in age in terms of voter appeal. And, at least according to polls, he trends better toward younger voters. Baby Boomers aren't his bedrock, as he prepares to accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday in Denver.

Consider the recent poll cited here a couple of days ago. Gen X women -- born 1965 to 1980 -- favor Obama 61 to 19 percent over Republican challenger John McCain.

Whether his choice of Biden -- born Nov. 20, 1942, a senior citizen in the eyes of demographers -- helps or hurts in this regard remains to be seen.