Much of the excitement around the candidacy of Barack Obama centers on his age. He's young. A huge part of his appeal is simple - out with the old, in with the new.
"Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done," the 45-year-old Obama said in announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Ill. "Today we are called once more, and it is time for our generation to answer that call."
The old that Obama wants to sweep away are the baby boomers. And, if he succeeds and does indeed usher in a new generation of American presidents - big, big ifs, of course - it will mark a stunning end to the national leadership of a generation once thought destined for political greatness.
If that happens, the presidential scorecard will read like this: World War II generation: 7, baby boomers: 2.
The World War II number could be six, depending on where you put Dwight D. Eisenhower. But it certainly includes John F. Kennedy (who famously said words that Obama echoed: "The torch is passed to a new generation, born in this century, tempered by war ... "), Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Perhaps it is not an all-star lineup, but it is still a full team. As for the two baby boomers - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - no matter what you think of their politics, both will certainly go down in history as flawed presidents.
If that's all the boomers produce, you have to wonder how it could have come to this. How could the generation that was raised in the politically charged atmosphere of the Cold War, whose social consciousness was pounded into shape first on the anvil of the civil rights and Vietnam War protests, who pushed issues like ecology and feminism and gay rights onto the national agenda, so quickly be seen as something to be discarded, to be left in the rear view mirror so the country can get on with its business?
It may well be that the seeds that have grown into an era of political cynicism were planted and nurtured by the idealism of the '60s.
"The formative political experience of the baby boomers was the Vietnam War and the protests against it," says Matthew Crenson, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. "They came of age politically in a time of abnormal politics and they don't know how to play the game in routine times."
Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University who has written extensively on the politics of the '60s, agrees.
"The movements of the '60s were very good at forcing issues forward that had been buried - and were being buried - by the conventions of politics," he says. "They were not so good at producing political leaders within the system."
The standard political tactic in the Vietnam protest era was confrontation and the resulting polarization. The idea was to force people to make the choice - which side are you on?
It was adopted by the anti-war movement after it worked for the civil rights demonstrators as the bulk of the country took the side of the black protesters in that struggle. But it should be noted that the real civil rights legislative gains were made by people like Lyndon Johnson and Everett M. Dirksen, political pros from an older generation who were masters at the art of politics - wheeling and dealing and compromising.
Crenson sees Vietnam-era tactics at work in Congress as the Democrats struggle with another unpopular war and try to get people to line up in a which-side-are-you-on? fashion.
"You can see the plight of the Democrats," he says. "They want the war to end, but they don't want to be seen as not supporting the troops. The situation is just too complex for the use of confrontational politics."
It is almost as if the Baby Boomers in Washington keep fighting the '60s all over again. The result is that instead of sitting down and hammering out agreements, they shout slogans at each other the way they did when they were attending demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.
It's "Are you pro-choice or pro-life?" Not, "Gee, abortion is not a great thing, but maybe it shouldn't be outlawed. How can we figure this out?"
"Baby Boomers are trapped in this notion of a generation that came of age with a sense of having a high level of aspiration, of wanting things to be better," says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Whether it is the war or the abortion controversy, there is a sense that they can't transcend the polarization on issues."
Though confrontational politics was associated with the left in the '60s, the tactic was taken up by its opponents even back then. Just look at the rhetoric of Spiro Agnew and George Wallace.
And that continued with the baby boomer heirs on that side of the aisle in a line that runs from Newt Gingrich to Tom DeLay. They recognized that, particularly on cultural issues like gay marriage, their side would win an are-you-with-us-or-against-us battle.
And many of the cultural battles of today are continuations of the fights of the '60s. You can draw a straight line from the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, of the mid-'60s to the decency rulings of the Federal Communications Commission of recent years. The same is true of other issues fought over then and now, such as abortion and drugs and sexual freedom.
Gitlin says that those continuing cultural wars have taken their toll on some Baby Boomers who might otherwise have developed into effective political leaders.
"It is certainly true that a lot of people who would have been political candidates got waylaid or crippled because of being tainted as a result of who they were in the '60s," he says. "A lot of that has to do with drugs. Even people who were able to overcome that, as Clinton did, were still damaged by it."
Peter Levine, a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, says you have to give the Baby Boomers their due politically, but that era left plenty of walking wounded.
"They achieved an awful lot of social change," he says. "But the fact that they were active at a very young age left them with a lot of liabilities for national office.
"They came through a time of drugs, the whole sexual revolution," he says. "So they had a lot of success politically, but they also had a lot of casualties because of things they did that make a difference when you get to the national level."
The result, Gitlin says, is that many of the effective Baby Boomer politicians never made it beyond the local levels because the baggage they carried from the cultural wars of the '60s - which might not have mattered to, say, big-city voters - was too heavy for national politics.
Clinton's ability to make it nationally, despite some '60s cultural baggage, might be because he was conscious early on of what he wanted to be, even as he participated in the political turmoil of his generation.
Gitlin points to Clinton's letter to his draft board in December of 1969. Clinton sought to deal with his draft status and his opposition to serving in the war in a way that allowed him "to maintain my political viability within the system."
As he goes on to say in that letter, "For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead."
That was unusual for that time. Most of those active in the anti-war movement were aggressively distrustful of conventional politics. People like Clinton were the exception. He was walking the line back then and it paid off 20 years later.
What may well account for some of the flaws of baby boomer politicians is that they come from a generation that, like Peter Pan, did not want to grow up. They were first identified because of their youth and the fact that their opinions at an age once considered immature had such an impact on society. Coming of age at a time when age was considered a liability can lead to immature behavior.
The embrace of youthfulness also led boomers to form their identity in opposition to the older generation and the "establishment" it represented. That made it difficult for boomers when they became the establishment. They didn't know how to act. They were still looking for someone to battle against.
"To be a worthy person meant to be an outsider," Gitlin says of the baby boomers' formative years. "Look at Bush: He is actually in his own way rebellious. Though he might never feel uneasy in a room full of billionaires, he has a Wild West version of being anti-establishment, making clear that he was from Crawford, not Wall Street."
Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says that Obama's announcement in Abraham Lincoln's hometown with words that echoed those of Kennedy's first inaugural shows he is trying to take advantage of these boomer liabilities, even if his 1962 birth date technically makes him a boomer.
"By situating himself in the context of Lincoln's nation-healing, Obama isn't suggesting that we are on the verge of another secession or civil war," Schaller says. "But the evidence of what might be called a 'soft' civil war in the country on cultural issues is very real and compelling, so it's reasonable for him to suggest that we begin to transcend the divide."
But, even as he runs against the Baby Boomers' attitudes - something that might be politically dangerous considering how many boomers vote - Obama is taking advantage of many of the changes that generation helped to make.
"Obama's generational advantage is not so much his age, but the fact that the attitudes of Americans his age or younger are more tolerant of everything from gay couples to miscegenation," Schaller says, something that would have not been the case had the boomers not taken up many of those causes.
Parry-Giles agrees. "The baby boomers fought battles so that this generation did not have to," she says.
But there is something else that Parry-Giles misses about the baby boomers, something she hopes Obama can do something about.
"Sometimes it is depressing talking to students these days because so many have absolutely no belief that politics can make a difference in their lives," she says. "Part of what was so attractive about the baby boomers was their optimism, their feeling that politics does matter, that legislative changes do impact people's lives.
"Obama may be positioning himself as the anti-baby boomer, but he is certainly using some of their vision," Parry-Giles says. "Maybe he can bring that vision to the next generation."
michael.hill@baltsun.com