POLITICS : Candidates Trying to Point Baby Boomers to Future : Kerrey, Clinton hope a generation will forget the ‘60s and think about their children’s prospects. Most weren’t activists anyway.

“Baby boom” politics finally may have grown up.

That was apparent in the announcement speeches last week of Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Both tried something novel: They spoke to the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 not as aging adolescents aching to recapture the 1960s but as parents trying to provide for their own children in the 1990s.

That bond of obligation between generations provided the central arch of Kerrey’s address. “My parents’ generation . . . gave us a thriving economy that enabled us to double our standard of living within a single generation,” said Kerrey, 48. “Next year, my son will graduate from high school. What kind of legacy will he inherit? My generation understands that the power of these earlier gifts is dwindling because our leadership simply has not renewed them.”

In Clinton’s case, the generational appeal was a secondary chord in a broader message of restructuring government around middle-class concerns. But Clinton, 45, struck precisely the same note as Kerrey, declaring: “I refuse to stand by and let our children become part of the first generation to do worse than their parents.”

These words represent such a departure from previous efforts to reach the baby boomers that they might be called the second generation of generational politics. Throughout the 1980s, Democratic presidential hopefuls sought to attract the politically fickle baby boomers primarily by evoking their past.

First came Gary Hart, who wooed baby boomers in the 1984 presidential campaign by insisting that the time had come for them to assume national leadership--that the generation that “marched together in movements that altered the course of American history . . . will make history yet again.”

Three years later, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) pegged his presidential hopes on a generational theme. “Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts,” Biden said.

Although Kerrey and Clinton declared their candidacies to blaring rock music, neither exhibited any of that nostalgia for the 1960s. Both portray the baby boomers not as a chosen people blessed with insights from exposure to John F. Kennedy and the Beatles but as merely one more generation seeking more opportunities for their children.

Some party analysts believe that message may find a broader audience.

For one thing, only a relatively small number of baby boomers shared the militant past Hart and Biden celebrated. In a 1986 survey of baby boomers, 75% said they had no involvement in 1960s social protests. Now, with the baby boomers ranging in age from 27 through 45, parenthood is a much more common experience. Six of 10 baby boom households now contain children under 18.

Secondly, parenthood has caused many baby boomers to reexamine views they held when they were rebelling against their own parents. In a 1988 survey, pollster Peter Hart found majorities of baby boomers now unhappy with significant parts of the 1960s’ sexual and social revolutions.

This focus on family may leave the baby boomers, who have been skeptical of government since Vietnam and Watergate, increasingly unenthusiastic about any call for an activist national agenda, even one centered on their concerns as parents, Karlyn Keene of the American Enterprise Institute argues. “For demographic reasons--such as having kids in school--they have less attachment to national issues and more to local,” she said.

Still, Kerrey, a divorced father of two teen-agers, and Clinton, married with an 11-year-old daughter, are both optimistic about making the baby boomers lift their sights--not by looking back at their adolescence but at the world their own children will confront.