The Elusive Search for the Political ‘New Generation’

If it wasn’t clear already, it became more evident earlier this month to 39-year-old Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), that running for President as the voice of a “new generation” involves more than quoting John F. Kennedy. Over one dizzying 10-day period, Gore found himself before entertainment heavyweights in Los Angeles defending his wife’s campaign against rock-and-roll lyrics she considers obscene, and then explaining his youthful use of marijuana before a battery of television cameras in Des Moines. Before the first group, Gore was forced to explain that he really wasn’t a square; before the second, that he wasn’t as hip as it seemed.

These daunting cultural cross-currents are only the latest obstacle threatening the generational transition that loomed in the Democratic party after the 1984 presidential campaign. Inevitably, leadership is passing to younger people--even Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, the party’s oldest contenders, were too young to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the appeal to the 1960s generation--the explicit call for a new group to rise up and take political power--hasn’t yet played a major part in this race, as it did in 1984.

In 1984, the generational appeal helped launch then-Sen. Gary Hart because it was grounded in both demographic and political reality. With former Vice President Walter F. Mondale and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland providing the perfect foils, Hart’s insurgency embodied resentment against party insiders that had festered since the Vietnam War.

With Mondale disposed of, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) out of the running, the path for the new-generation candidates seemed clear in 1988. Most of the Democrats who joined the hunt--Hart, former Arizona Gov. Bruce E. Babbitt, Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Gore, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson--spent at least part of the 1960s shaping their political perspective in college or graduate school.

But the candidates haven’t been able to tap those roots effectively. If anything, the jarring events of this year--from the stock market plunge to the incessant scandals in Washington--have made youth something of a handicap. It is probably no coincidence that the oldest candidates in both parties--Simon and Dukakis among the Democrats, and Vice President George Bush and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) for the Republicans--are now in the strongest positions. Even the baby boom generation may not be ready to turn over power to one of its own, argues Paul E. Maslin, a young pollster working for Simon.

What’s gone wrong? For one thing, broad claims that baby boomers were waiting to march again were overstated from the start. Hart, who carried the Big Chill banner last time, seemed to sense the limits of that appeal and moved on in 1988 to broader concepts of “true patriotism” and “economic empowerment.” Biden tried to take Hart’s place, using quotes from John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to evoke the tone of the civil rights and anti-war movements. Though his skillfully delivered speech moved audiences at first, eventually its unabashedly emotional appeal came to sound calculated.

Moreover, Biden’s tributes to the ‘60s spirit tended to exaggerate his involvement in those events. At one level, that indicated a tendency that later proved fatal to his campaign; at another, it was a strangely fitting impulse, for Biden’s speeches exaggerated the entire generation’s involvement. One major survey of baby boomers last year found that only 25% were active in social protests at all. Biden recalled for baby boomers a past that neither he, nor they, shared.

As politicians across America have been reminded in recent weeks, that past involved activities more polarizing than idealistic marches and sit-ins. When Babbitt and Gore acknowledged having smoked marijuana, one Babbitt aide told reporters that everyone under 40 would understand. That may be true; but not everyone is under 40. In a recent New York Times/CBS poll, a plurality of Democrats over 45 said marijuana usage should disqualify a candidate from the presidency. Overall, a third of all Democrats said pot-smoking was cause enough for them to write off a candidate.

Though most attention has focused on the fact that a majority of Americans seem willing to forgive early marijuana use, in this case, the minority view is more telling. Older people, those most disturbed by the revelations, are the most likely voters in primaries. No candidate could afford to lose so much support on such a peripheral matter. If even a portion of that antipathy endures through the primaries, it would seriously damage any candidate--especially such little-known ones as this year’s Democrats.

The most revealing aspect of the episode was Babbitt’s and Gore’s insistence that they would discourage young people from emulating their behavior. Those remarks, more clearly than public reaction, caught the tenor of the times.

That tone is far different from the 1960s. Advocates of generational politics maintain the election of 1988 will be much like 1960, with a young Democrat defeating the successor of an aging Republican by promising to “get the country moving again.” But in 1960, Kennedy rode a wave of political and cultural liberalization.

Though polls now show Americans taking more liberal views on the role of government, this does not extend to cultural matters. If anything, with concern about drugs and AIDS, the country is growing more conservative culturally. In a 1986 Gallup survey, two-thirds of those polled favored criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana, up from only 41% a decade ago. In another Gallup survey this winter, 55% said homosexual relations should not be legal. And almost half the Americans now say premarital sex is “wrong,” up from 39% just two years ago.

Not surprisingly, older people tend to hold the most conservative views. But their children and grandchildren aren’t pulling too hard against the reins. On matters that might affect personal life style--women in the workplace, the propriety of living together before marriage and the availability of abortion--young people hold culturally liberal views; in that sense tolerance remains the great legacy of the 1960s. But on matters less intimately related to immediate experience they are conservative. An annual survey of entering college freshmen in 1986 found a majority believed homosexual relations should be illegal, and only 21% supported legalization of marijuana.

Even the baby boomers’ liberal views are eroded by parenthood. If the boomers haven’t lurched rightward on cultural questions, “there are certainly different standards applied” when their children are involved, notes Gregory B. Markus, a University of Michigan political scientist.

In 1960, Kennedy--the paradigm generational candidate--anchored his message on a call for sacrifice and self-discipline. After the long binge of the Reagan years, this year’s crop of new-generation Democrats may be correct in believing that to be a message for 1988. But political history rarely repeats itself precisely; though the call for self-restraint, a return to standards and a new focus on solving unmet problems may well play an important role next year, in this more conservative cultural environment, it could come from an entirely unanticipated direction.

“If anybody is going to take that line, it could be the new right,” says historian Allen J. Matusow, author of an acclaimed history of the 1960s, “calling for an end to materialism, a restoration of spiritual values and getting rid of the excesses and self-indulgences of our society.”