Obama: Our first Gen-X President

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as our nation's 44th president. Born on August 4, 1961, he's just 47 years old. He will be the first African-American president in the history of the U.S., the significance of which is touched on poignantly by Bishop Woodie White in his annual birthday letter to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my new United Methodist Reporter column, I ask the question, "Is Obama our first Gen-X president?" I believe the answer to that question is yes. It is true that in I have written about my skepticism of considering Obama a full X'er in the past - both here and here. But I've changed my mind.

In one sense, the Baby Boomer generation is a demographic reality. Between 1946 and 1964, the number of live births per 1,000 people in the U.S. population spiked. The U.S. Census Bureau considers those years to be the parameters on the Baby Boomers for that very reason.

But in another sense, a generation is a cultural concept that does not bend readily to hard statistical parameters. As I have argued elsewhere, a generation is ultimately defined by shared experience. And in that sense, Obama is very much a Gen X'er.

For instance, the Boomer experience is defined in so many ways by the period from the mid-1950s through the 1960s: in national politics from JFK (the dashing hero) to Nixon (the dark villain), in the Civil Rights struggle from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 'revolutions' from music styles to attitudes toward sex and gender, with all of it overshadowed by the geo-political tensions associated with the struggle against communism - the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and (most pointedly for the Boomers' enduring generational personality) Vietnam.

Obama is too young to have been affected firsthand by any of these Boomer experiences. Instead, his personality was shaped by a specifically Generation X childhood: growing up in an era of increased globalization, the shrinking world (in terms of travel, education, and religious pluralism, in addition to the economy), the rapid advance in communications technologies (cable television, evolution of the telephone, various audio and video recording devices, and the personal computer), the race and gender issues of a post-Civil Rights and post-sexual revolution period, and the reality of increased instances of divorce and broken homes, families with two parents working outside the home, and the image of the 'latchkey kid.' He was not, of course, affected by all of these in equal measure. Some of the features of Gen X upbringing were more a fixture in the 1980s (when I mostly grew up) than the 1970s (when Obama mostly grew up). But his life was touched by many of them. And in my book, that makes him an X'er.

Two points to note about this, and both of them have to do with the way Obama himself is changing the definition of Generation X. The first is the date. Noted Gen-X author Jeff Gordinier suggests in X Saves the World that Generation X should be dated from around 1961 because of the birthdates of Slackers filmmaker Richard Linklater (b.1960) and novelist Douglas Coupland (b. 1961). I've always thought Coupland deserved front rank in terms of who defines Generation X because he wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that firmly entrenched the term in pop culture. With Obama's birthdate also in 1961, it seems reasonable to consider the question of Generation X's beginning date settled.

The second point is around how Obama is trying to give a certain characteristic Gen X'ers share a greater prominence. If one of the iconic images of Baby Boomers is that of 1960's protest (a mass event involving lots of angry young people chanting things), then the iconic image of Generation X has to be what I am doing right now: sitting alone in my living room, trying to make a difference but doing so in a more individual and less 'partisan' manner. In lots of ways, it seems like Gen X'ers are less partisan people in general, and the technological isolation that we experience has made us hungry for community (though in more localized and less 'mass' ways than our predecessors). That, in my mind, is a lot of what Obama represents. We've all heard his message about 'change,' and I usually take that to be transcending the partisan rancor of his Boomer predecessors. If you haven't read his memoir - Dreams from My Father - you should. It is a book about a deeply personal journey whose early life was shaped by many of the forces that X'ers have typically struggled with, and I would argue that it is also a book about searching for community. It's Gen X through and through.

Will he be up to the task? No way to tell for sure, but I suspect he will be. E.J. Dionne and David Brooks were on NPR yesterday evening talking about meeting with him recently, and both the liberal Dionne and the conservative Brooks spoke in very complementary terms about his demeanor, knowledge of issues, and approach to meeting with people from both sides of the aisle.