"The Obama-McCain age gap that matters" - it is about worldview & ideology, not health

[Pirate Smile]

The Obama-McCain age gap that matters
Many years separate the two candidates, but it's not a gap you can measure with an EKG.

By Ezra Klein
June 1, 2008

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Barack Obama and McCain are separated by the largest age difference of any two presidential candidates in history. If Obama is elected, he will be, at 47, among the youngest presidents in history; if McCain wins, he'll be the oldest to win the office, at 72.

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The real significance of the age difference is not about health and mortality but about worldview, about ideology, about how the candidates understand the threats we face and the world we're in. A candidate like McCain, born in the final years of the Depression and shortly before the outbreak of World War II, will simply have a different frame of reference from a candidate born, as Obama was, in 1961, the year President Kennedy took office and Bob Dylan arrived in New York. And that should be discussed openly.

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McCain came of age as the exultation of our seemingly clean triumph over the Axis countries shaded into the haunting anxiety of the Nuclear Age and superpower competition. When he says, as he often does, that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists," it needs to be understood in that context: The Axis had a real shot at world domination. The Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal could have annihilated America. McCain, like others of his generation, is a man accustomed to transcendental challenges that come from states, the only actors traditionally able to pose a serious threat.
Thus, he has a tendency to play up the role of states in terrorism. In February 2003, McCain told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that "the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda are hotly debated today. Terrorist trails are designed to be obscure. Saddam knows that." In McCain's hands, the very absence of meaningful linkage between Hussein and Osama bin Laden became evidence of their collaboration. Similarly, McCain has often been criticized for repeatedly, and mistakenly, claiming that Iran is accepting and training members of Al Qaeda. But it is a revealing error. In both cases, McCain grasped to connect the threat of a diffuse terrorist network to traditional states. Searching for the transcendent danger, he overlooked the atomized threat.

By contrast, Obama passed the tumultuous '60s watching cartoons. He was 14 when the Vietnam War ended. By the time he had graduated from law school, at 29, the Soviet Union had crumbled. Which explains his apparent confusion at being drafted into the culture wars of the '60s.
Obama has suffered in the campaign, for instance, for his association with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, who's now an aging intellectual and activist in Chicago. Pressed on the connection in April's ABC debate, Obama replied: "The notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."

To Obama, those battles really don't make sense, and the hunch that they're fading into the past was part of the original rationale for his candidacy. In his book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote: "In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation -- a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago -- played out on the national stage."

Those are just two examples of many. The ages of the candidates have a profound effect on the direction of the campaign, but because of philosophy and policies, not lipid profiles and treadmill tests. The question, of course, is which candidate's America will more closely approximate that of a majority of voters. Because in the end, although the age of the candidates may matter, it won't decide the election. Rather, the age of the electorate will.

Ezra Klein is an associate editor at the American Prospect. He blogs at EzraKlein.com.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-klein1-2008jun01,0,7873748.story

Why Age Matters
03 Jun 2008 09:47 am

Ezra has a perceptive op-ed on the Obama McCain age gap:

The real significance of the age difference is not about health and mortality but about worldview, about ideology, about how the candidates understand the threats we face and the world we're in. A candidate like McCain, born in the final years of the Depression and shortly before the outbreak of World War II, will simply have a different frame of reference from a candidate born, as Obama was, in 1961, the year President Kennedy took office and Bob Dylan arrived in New York. And that should be discussed openly.

It is one of those things that doesn't fully emerge until the two candidates are placed next to one another. But I have a feeling that the generational narrative of this campaign from here on out will be a very powerful one. It isn't that one man is much younger than the other. It is that his supporters are skewed younger as well - and that the issues in this campaign resonate differently with the generations.

The culture war means less as the age cohort gets younger; the reflexive assumption that America is required to be everywhere on the planet, with 50 planned permanent military bases in Iraq, for example, is less obvious to a post-Iraq generation than to those with memories of World War II; rising debt will worry the next generation more than those on the brink of retirement; social questions such as same-sex marriage are no longer very salient questions for those under 40.

My own sense is that this will be the defining faultline of the contest. Not age as such; but generation. And the key voters will be those in between and whether they decide to ally themselves with their parents or their children.


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