Obama and the Generations

One of the things I will have to assimilate into my understanding of an Obama presidency is that he is not of my generation. He is the first person to be elected president who is younger than I am, and by quite a bit.

In fact, Obama is closer to the generation of my students and my children than he is to mine. He is not a baby boomer, and this makes a difference in how we respectively organize our political understanding of the world. Barack Obama is not a product of the New Left, nor did he participate in the Civil Rights Movement nor the anti-War Movement.

What this may boil down to is that he does not articulate his politics through much of an ideological lens, nor a strident lens of a moral rectitude or ethical categories. (I am struck at not only how few references to the Civil Rights Movement he made during his campaign, but how his discourse differs from the moral language of Martin Luther King, for example, whose prophetic oratory was riddled with references to justice, and the Manichean dichotomies of good and evil).

We hear little of this from Obama. He seems to be all pragmatism, and given his stated commitment to unify the American people, his pragmatism adheres well with his aspirations.

We have entered a new era. It may not be fully mine as the world turns on, but I remain hopeful.