The Real Obama Message

44.

That is Barack Obama’s current age. He was born in 1962.

That means none of the 1960s trips that have defined the last decades affect him. By the time Barack Obama was 13 the Vietnam War was over. Ronald Reagan was shot when he was 19. All the arguments about the Nixon Thesis — which are arguments about the 1960s — can go right over his head, and everyone knows it.

Obama is the first post-baby boom politician to reach a stage in his life where he might run for President. Americans are hungry for this moment. We are tired of the 1960s. But more important, we know, instinctively, that the Nixon Thesis has passed its sell-by date. The Nixon Thesis of Conflict is irrelevant to our current problems. It doesn’t ask the right questions, let alone come up with any answers.

We’re looking for something new, anything new, and Barack Obama represents that.

It doesn’t matter much what he says. He sounds (in many ways) like Bill Clnton, triangulating between extremes, defining a middle ground. And critics are right. This means he hasn’t made hard choices.

But the same can be said for tens of millions of voters his age and younger, men and women who have watched politics being defined by events that don’t concern them for two decades.

The trips and dramas of baby boomers — what we did in the war and what we did in the war against the war — don’t matter any more. In point of fact, they don’t matter to most baby boomers. I was born in 1955, at the height of the baby boom, and Woodstock happened when I was 14. I had a draft number of 55 in 1973, and no one was called. I watched the decade on TV, but it wasn’t really my struggle.

Once you acknowledge Obama you can break free of the trap both parties
are in, the trap of either endorsing Nixonism and its Thesis of
Conflict, its need for enemies both foreign and domestic, for an
eternal other, and its opposite, which is the other or can easily be turned into it.

It’s a completely dysfunctional political relationship, this Nixon Thesis, and voters en masse want it ended.  It is the political equivalent of ritualized sado-masochism, victims and victimizers, beaters and beaten.

But here’s what Obama does not represent:

• He doesn’t represent any new Thesis, just a rejection of the old one.
• He doesn’t represent any new priorities, just a rejection of the old ones.
• He is a tabular rasa of values, with just his personal myth to sustain him.

There will be history played out over the next two years. A lot of
history. There was a lot of historical distance betwen 1966 and 1968 as
well. Can Barack Obama ride that wave? I don’t know. And I don’t care.

But the Barack Obama boomlet is still a hopeful moment. It means
Americans are ready for the next Thesis, that they are seeking new
myths, and new values, to define power in a new era.

And since most of them use the Internet, this is where they will look.

That’s also the message behind Time Magazine’s "Person of the Year"
nonsense. Look in the mirror. That’s where the change is most needed.