The Obama Message

I have been reluctant to write about Barack Obama lately because I really felt I nailed the subject back in December.

Obama’s message is the Internet Thesis. He doesn’t express it that way. He doesn’t really address the Internet at all. But when he calls for government to operate by consensus, that it be open and transparent, he is expressing that Thesis, and it’s resonating.

All the current takedowns of Obama are really beside the point.  Both sides are demanding specifics from him for only one reason, so they can drag him down to the gutter, where American politics has lived for a generation.

Obama explicitly rejects the gutter. He doesn’t proclaim himself a "black candidate," he’s a candidate who is black. He doesn’t lean against the Nixon-Bush Thesis, as Hillary Clinton does, because he doesn’t believe it exists. He doesn’t challenge or reject that Thesis, as John Edwards does, for precisely the same reason.  That Thesis is irrelevant.

The media which is demanding answers of him has the same problem. They are steeped in the current thesis. It is all they know. All the candidates they know of who tried to defy the stereotypes — whether failures such as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, or successes like Bill Clinton — were eventually defined in terms of it.  Thus he must be, too, right?

Wrong.

Time passes. People age. We know this fact while failing to account
for it. My daughter is now 19, and she will vote in 2008. She is a
card-carrying member of The Internet Generation. She "wrote" her first
computer software review at age 3.
The Web was spun when she was 6. She has had her own PC with full
network access since age 10. There are millions like her across the
country.

To my daughter Ronald Reagan is a figure from history, no more real
than Harry Truman is to her father, or than Theodore Roosevelt is to
her grandfather.

And another thing about the Baby Boom. I’m 52, yet as I have noted
several times I did not participate in the 1960s. Most Baby Boomers
didn’t. Vietnam was an issue for those born from roughly 1940 through
1952, people who came of age from 1962 through 1971. John Edwards is
barely inside this cohort, barely. The peak of the Baby Boom came in
1955 for boys, in 1957 for girls, and it ended in 1963. Technically
this makes Obama, born in 1962, a Boomer, but he came of age during the
Reagan Administration, and didn’t complete his education until the
early 1990s.

The plain demographic fact is that if you’re under 55 the so-called
"baby boomer issues" which engendered the Nixon Thesis are no longer
relevant. They are not alive in you, and never have been. Any more than
they are alive in my daughter.

So this obsession of politicians and pundits and media talking heads with Vietnam, with the 1960s, or with Jane Fonda on a tank have as much
resonance for us as talk of the New Deal had in the 1960s, or talk of
Jacksonian Democracy had for those living through the Civil War. That
is, none.

This is Obama’s constituency. Anyone under 55 gets where he’s coming from.

Barack Obama offers a blank slate, a fresh start, a new argument.
Barack Obama promises, through his very presence on the national stage,
to banish the Baby Boom, and leave the Nixon Thesis of Conflict in the
dust of history. That’s why 20,000 people showed up at Georgia Tech.
That’s why 100,000 people have contributed to his campaign, already.

Let history be history. Let the past be the past. Whether you were
left, right, or seeking a Third Way, those days are over now. Those
issues are dead now.

We have other issues to deal with. The War Against Oil. Social
mobility. Getting more from our national health care budget. Global
equity. Peace. Reconciliation. Technology.

What does all that mean? Obama doesn’t tell us. But we understand it anyway.

And on a personal note, I currently favor John Edwards.