Soccer Dad

Skipping generations

Yesterday Michael Barone wrote an insightful column about how Sens. McCain and Obama "skipped" generations and how skipping has both informed and benefited their campaigns.

For McCain:

To most voters, McCain seems to stand above or at least aside from that culture war. His lack of fervor about issues like abortion may bother some cultural conservatives, but it is comforting to those with more ambivalent views. If elected, McCain would be the only president from the "silent generation," born between the World War II veterans who served as president from 1961 to 1993 and the two boomers who have served since then. His age and generational identity may turn out to be a political asset.

For Obama:

Obama, born at the tail end of the baby boom generation in 1961, didn't miss the '80s in the same sense that McCain missed the '60s. But in a decade in which Americans decided that government didn't work very well and that markets did, Obama chose to make his way outside the suddenly booming private sector.

Sen. Obama, writes Barone:

is proposing the kind of overgenerous welfare programs that were finally rejected in the backwash of the '80s ...

However in difficult economic times when prices are moving inexorably higher on nearly everything, proposing such government solutions will be very appealing to the general electorate, not just Democratic primary voters.

Sen. McCain then, would benefit by being less committed to those platforms that are divisive, focusing instead on pragmatic (but mostly conservative) programs to address the nations needs.

This is what William Kristol focuses on in Biography Isn't enough.

After making the clever point:

But here’s something for the McCain campaign to remember: Democracies don’t always elect the man who has done the most for his country.

Consider our last four presidential elections. If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H. W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military.

Kristol gets down to the substance of his argument:

After all, what’s going to happen this week as McCain travels around the country? The headlines are going to overtake the attempted focus on biography. At McCain’s first press availability, he’ll be asked about the fighting in Iraq, and about various plans for regulating Wall Street and addressing the housing situation. His answers to these questions will make more news than his prepared speeches.

Candidate McCain should be working overtime on a broad reform agenda — education reform, health insurance reform, tax reform, government reform, Wall Street reform. He could start by outlining an up-to-date, capitalism-friendly and transparency-requiring approach to regulating the credit markets. (He might also suggest taxing “carried interest” as ordinary income, if only to watch the fur fly among hedge-fund fat cats.)

barack obama, john mccain.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 31, 2008 5:53 AM