‘96 Campaign Gives Birth to New Generational Debate

There they go again.

The arguments between America’s baby boomers and their parents that rang across kitchen tables through the 1960s and 1970s have unexpectedly resurfaced in the presidential race between President Clinton, the first baby boomer in the Oval Office, and Bob Dole, a man old enough to be the president’s father.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Dole drew a generational line in the sand, criticizing the “corps of the elite” in the Clinton White House, and by extension, the roughly 76-million-member baby boom generation itself, for a breakdown in American values in the past 30 years.

Dole’s unsparing indictment, and his celebration of the “old values” he learned in a sepia America, turned on its head the lines of generational argument that have marked recent U.S. politics.

Since the early 1980s, the nation has seen a succession of young candidates--though notably not Clinton himself--argue that the time had arrived for the baby boomers--those born between 1946 and 1964--to assume national leadership. Dole, in effect, is now arguing that his GI Generation of World War II veterans--the generation that dominated the White House for the 40 years before Clinton’s election--possesses a set of values and experiences better suited to lead America into the next century.

“Dole is not saying my generation is better than your generation,” said John Buckley, the Dole campaign’s communications director and himself a baby boomer. “What he is saying is that he . . . can help restore some of the values that were so consequential in America’s postwar success.”

Dole’s aides admit that they aren’t sure that on the campaign trail this fall he will continue to contrast his generation and the baby boomers as directly as he did in his acceptance speech. But the underlying components of his critique--the case that America slipped the rails morally during the 1960s, that Clinton lacks a strong foundation of beliefs and that Dole’s own experience better qualifies him to lead the nation--are all central pieces of the challenger’s message and likely to be major themes through November.

Almost universally, Democrats argue that Dole’s bold generational contrast was a political mistake because it called attention to his own age and left the impression he was trying to recapture a vanished past. “It says to people that he is looking backward, not forward,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster.

Also, some commentators and members of the public have questioned just how good the good old days were--for instance, despite Dole’s recognition in his speech that racial injustice clouded his generation’s America, those who experienced the segregated South are not likely to view the past as nostalgically as he does.

But many conservatives believe that Dole’s astringent critique of modern U.S. society will strike a resonant chord, even among those baby boomers who share the suspicion that their parents’ generation built a more reliable and morally stable world.

“I think he is giving public voice to something that even baby boomers know about,” said Pete Wehner, policy director at the conservative Empower America think tank. “We all know we’re part of a self-indulgent generation, and I think people know that Dole is from a generation that had less and whined less and really did have some notion of duty and honor and country. And I think people in our generation miss that.”

Ironically, the assault against the values of the “elite” baby boomers--a group, Dole memorably asserted his speech, that “never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned”--comes even as the inexorable current of middle-aged responsibilities carry the entire generation toward more moderate views on social and political issues.

“Marriages, mortgages and children tend to have a predictable impact,” said Karlyn Keene, a public-opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, another think tank.

Though baby boomers decisively broke from their parents’ generation on most social questions--particularly those relating to sex, family and the role of women--time has eroded many of those differences and blurred the boomers’ distinctiveness as a voting bloc.

In 1992, for instance, Clinton’s margin over then-President Bush was identical with baby boomers and non-boomers, according to the Los Angeles Times exit poll of voters. When asked by pollsters which party they support, baby boomers divide almost exactly like the public overall.

Likewise, surveys by the Pew Research Center show that roughly the same percentage of baby boomers now attend church regularly as middle-aged adults did 30 years ago. And on most questions relating to sexual mores--whether it is wrong for women to bear children out of wedlock, whether children are always better off being raised in a two-parent home, whether homosexuals should receive civil rights protections--baby boomers no longer define the vanguard: Times’ surveys show that boomers take positions more conservative than younger Americans, though not as conservative as their elders.

Like Clinton’s own shock of gray hair--and his 50th birthday this week--these changes create an incongruous backdrop for Dole’s critique of the baby boom; indeed, in recent years policymakers have spent more time talking about the impending costs of retiring the baby boom than coping with their cultural legacy.

But even without Dole’s sharp words last week, a generational comparison between Clinton and Dole was inevitable. If Americans replace Clinton with Dole, they would be reaching back across generational lines to an extent unmatched in American history. Only two presidents (Ronald Reagan in 1980 and James Buchanan in 1856) have been as much as 13 years older than the president they succeeded; Dole is 23 years Clinton’s senior.

Moreover, each man, in many ways, embodies the popular image of his generation: Dole stoic, taciturn and veiled; Clinton voluble, effusive, and hyper-articulate. Each man was stamped by the war that molded his era. Dole served, at great personal cost, in World War II at a time when most young men served; Clinton avoided the draft in Vietnam, at a cost of lasting moral ambiguity, at a time when many young men did not serve.

What makes the generational contrast unusual is that Dole is the one emphasizing it. In American politics, generational arguments have mostly been the province of the young.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy claimed the presidency on behalf of a generation that had been “born in this century [and] tempered by war. . . .” During the 1980s, Democratic presidential contenders Gary Hart and Joseph R. Biden Jr. called on baby boomers to rekindle the youthful idealism that sparked the protest movements of the 1960s and claim the mantle of national leadership.

That argument derailed in the chasm between cultural myth and demographic fact: Surveys showed that only about 2% of baby boomers participated extensively in the social movements of the 1960s, and relatively few were moved by the call to re-create them. Though he emphasized his youth and energy, Clinton in his 1992 campaign conspicuously refused to follow in Hart’s tracks and avoided any suggestion that his campaign represented a coming of age for baby boomers.

“We thought it was an exclusive argument that left people out,” said one of Clinton’s advisors. “If you’re saying, ‘It’s time for our generation,’ well, fine, what about everyone else?”

To the extent Clinton has used generational arguments, it has been in a decidedly unpoetic fashion, devoted mostly to addressing his fellow baby boomers as the parents of children. During the past year, Clinton has rolled out a seemingly endless succession of policy proposals--from an expansion of the family leave law to regulations on tobacco advertising aimed at young people--intended to provide tangible tools for harried parents balancing family and work.

It is actually Dole who has delivered generational arguments as expansive as Hart’s. Around the time of his presidential announcement last year, Dole linked his decision to run directly to his experience in World War II, where his shoulder was shattered by German fire in Italy during the war’s waning days. In a series of speeches, he poignantly declared that while traveling to Europe for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, he came to believe “there was one more call to serve . . . one more mission for my generation.”

Though echoes of that theme remain in Dole’s focus on his military record--and the implicit contrast that draws with Clinton’s lack of service--the GOP nominee has almost entirely abandoned the “one more mission” line of argument of late. The generational message that succeeded it at the GOP convention last week was at once more elegiac and more confrontational.

His argument boiled down to the contention that America’s values have been undermined by the revolution in social mores the nation has experienced since the 1960s--what Dole called “decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values . . . [of] God, family, honor, duty, country. . . .”

To a degree almost unprecedented in presidential politics, Dole then argued that the America of his youth was a morally superior country to the nation of today. With his roots in that sturdy past, he concluded, he was better able to reset the nation’s moral compass than the young “elitists” in the White House--and by implication the baby boomers who set in motion the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

For conservative critics of modern American culture, those words were electric. Dole “admonished the self-indulgent [baby boomers] that they have squandered the inheritance Dole’s generation bequeathed to them,” wrote conservative columnist Cal Thomas this week. “Dole attempted to use the moral authority of his generation--forged by the Great Depression and World War II--to point out our collective guilt.”

But Democrats remain dubious that many voters will connect to arguments that generalize about entire generations. “People feel themselves as part of their families and part of their communities and they can be appealed to that way,” said Mandy Grunwald, a Democratic media consultant who worked for Clinton in 1992. “But I don’t think people think of themselves generationally. I don’t think it’s a daily identification.”

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The Age Factor

Americans nationwide have generational differences on some social issues, according to Times Polls:

Do you agree or disagree? “It’s always best for children to be raised in a two-parent home.”

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ Agree 59% 67% 86% Disagree 39% 32% 13% Don’t know 2% 1% 1%

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Should divorce be:

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ Easier to obtain 9% 10% 4% More difficult to obtain 35% 42% 49% Stay the same as it is now 49% 43% 40% Don’t know 7% 5% 6%

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A woman deciding to have a baby out of wedlock is:

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ Always wrong 15% 30% 51% Almost always wrong 11% 19% 17% Sometimes wrong 42% 28% 15% Not wrong at all 28% 17% 10% Don’t know 4% 6% 7%

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Favor or oppose abortion:

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ Favor 53% 50% 47% Indifferent 14% 11% 12% Oppose 29% 33% 38% Don’t know 1% 1% 2%

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Families in this country are threatened more today by:

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ An economic climate that 58% 42% 41% makes finding jobs and affordable health care difficult or A moral climate that hurts 33% 43% 38% community standards and strong family units Don’t know 9% 14% 20%

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Should homosexuals get protection under civil rights laws?

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AGES 18-29 30-49 50+ Get protection 48% 44% 39% Not get protection 49% 52% 49% Don’t know 3% 4% 12%

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Source: Los Angeles Times Polls