For president, a generational conflict

The two men competing for the unenviable job of trying to reverse this decline present a classic conflict of generations. Barack Obama is 47 years old; John McCain is 72, old enough to be Obama's father. This unusual age spread between presidential candidates brings to mind a wide variety of familiar literary plots about father-and-son conflicts. In classical mythology, the son must kill the father to allow for Earth's renewal; in the modern TV sitcom, the son must overcome the father's refusal to let him have the car on Saturday night; in soap opera, the father, decrepit and no longer roadworthy, must be made to surrender the car keys to the son; and so on.

Once, popular comedies of the "Father Knows Best" school allowed the old fellow a bit of dignity and occasional homey expressions of half-baked wisdom, but the prevailing rule was that youth must be served. Something along this line seems to lie behind the intense Obama campaign to register legions of young voters. It assumes that youth is on Obama's side, and, indeed, it is rare to hear a kind word for McCain from anyone under 30.

McCain may take comfort from statistics showing that young people don't vote in impressive numbers but that old folks do. Whether his age will fetch masses of the elderly to his side is by no means certain. Despite his 72 years, McCain has a giddy, impetuous quality more commonly associated with youth than Obama's pensive gravity.

Watching McCain is entertaining. He seems never to have gotten over being a bomber pilot and notorious bad boy of the Naval Academy. It was the giddy, impetuous bomber pilot McCain who gave America Sarah Palin as the best possible right-wing Republican to be the next vice president of the United States and thus -- to the delight of leading political wordsmiths -- galvanized, electrified and energized his party's famous "base," its indispensable army of Christian churchgoers.

Though he has sometimes worked well with Democrats to get legislative results, McCain also has the amateur chess player's weakness for making an impulsive move just to see what will happen: thus his eleventh-hour intervention in the Wall Street crisis negotiations. In chess, what almost always happens after the impulsive move is doom.

Obama lacks impetuosity, giddiness and the zest for demagogic combat, or maybe he has simply been too well brought up to talk back to a man old enough to be his father. Or perhaps he is just another one of those cool Harvard Law Review cats who can't field dress a roasted chicken, much less a moose.

Obama seems to me very much like the Jack Kennedy who ran for president in 1960. Kennedy was the young candidate speaking for a new generation, insisting that it was their turn, pressing the old to get out of the way and let the Earth turn.

At first, everything seemed wrong about Kennedy. His speeches were too short. His accent was funny. His tailoring was too elegant. Above all, he was simply too young for a nation that thought presidents should look like Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt or Hoover. He was 43 years old. Many thought it amazing that a Catholic could be elected president.

The fascinating question this year is whether a black man can be elected president. Should McCain prevail, the less-than-amazing prospect is for continuation of the elder generation's favorite causes: bellicose efforts to bring democracy to the whole world and adding ever more conservatives to the Supreme Court. Palin could be the next Richard Nixon.

Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. His books include "The Good Times," "Growing Up" and "Looking Back." This piece will appear in the forthcoming election issue of the New York Review of Books.