Obama: Gen X or not?

In some ways, it's an interesting question. Obama was born in 1961, which by most calculations is at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation.

Susan Ferrechio wrote an article in the Washington D.C. Examiner presenting the point of view that Obama is, indeed, the first Generation X presidential candidate. I actually have a neat connection to this article - I was interviewed for it! And while I'm not 100% sold on the idea that Obama is an X'er, I do find some of Ferrechio's points to be persuasive.

In my own writing on the parameters and characteristics of Generation X (which you can read here, for example), I have suggested that Gen-X really starts at about 1965 and goes until 1982. That allows its beginning to match up with the end of the baby boom (which is, in some sense, a measurable demographic characteristic). But Generation X itself is really more of a cultural concept than a statistical category, so any parameters of its beginning and ending are going to be inexact (Ferrechio, for instance, defines Gen-X as those born between 1961 and 1981, which allows her to include Obama in it).

One way of thinking about Obama's place in Generation X it is to look at his two chief rivals for the presidency - Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and now John McCain in the general election. In some ways, those two are quintessential Baby Boomers from the political left and political right. Clinton swung left after her mid-1960s flirtation with Barry Goldwater; together with husband Bill, she epitomizes the New Democrat of the Baby Boom generation, who consolidated the political and cultural gains of the 1960s and 70s and then moved to the center (particularly on economics) as a strategy to get elected.

McCain, on the other hand, was one of the young men who marched off to Vietnam and had his life determinatively shaped in the process. Regardless of his reputation as a maverick (and his advocacy for such non-conservative policies as campaign finance reform), McCain is more or less a Baby Boomer Republican whose career was largely influenced by Reagan conservatism (i.e., free market economics and a hawkish foreign policy).

As I point out in an earlier blog post, Obama has the distinction of growing up too late to be affected by Vietnam in his formative years. And he was too young for his personality to be forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights struggle as well. His rhetoric is heavy on the language of 'change', even if it's not always clear what he means by that. And he places emphasis on wanting to get past the very partisan divisiveness that the Boomer left and right have been embroiled in for the past several years. So in many ways, Obama's candidacy signals a cultural shift, even if he belongs chronologically to the last few years of the Baby Boomer generation.

A lot of this is just a matter of interpretation. As with all cultural notions, there aren't really any statistics to employ. I'll admit that, if Obama wins in November, his very presidency will undoubtedly have a big impact on how Generation X is defined. At any rate, it's good food for thought during while the Democratic National Convention is going on.