Generation Gaps and Obama

In a post discussing her own reservations about Barack Obama, Amba tangentially discusses the disconnect between herself and her more liberal friends and family.

The dyed-in-the-wool Democrats I know, many of them in my own family and among my closest friends, are very solemn about being in (as opposed to on) the right. To them, the simple virtue of being simply pro-choice , antiwar, green, and anticorporate is obvious and incontrovertible. If you tell them you don't think it's that simple, they look at you like you've sold your soul to the devil. Not to unquestioningly accept the pure rightness of those positions is to have malignly mutated, to have become stupid, greedy, backward, and corrupt.

I wonder if it’s a generational thing or perhaps a regional thing (Amba’s roots are in deep blue Chicago and New York City as distinct from my red and purple Dallas and San Antonio roots), but my left-leaning friends and family are not nearly so absolutist. Yes, I know the type of which Amba writes and I do catch some flak for the rightward slide I’ve taken, but only a handful of those with whom I’m closest believe liberalism to be “obvious and incontrovertible.”

Almost all my closest friends and family are Democrats and only a tiny fraction are significantly conservative, so this isn’t a matter of me not knowing enough people on the left. However, other than my online blog friends and my parents, everyone I talk politics with is roughly my age. When I voice a more conservative stance during friendly debates, I am not looked at as a mutant but rather engaged. They may not often concede any ground, but they will take my opinions seriously.

I bring this up as a long way to voice a thought about why younger voters are backing Obama in such large numbers. It’s not just youth’s well-documented infatuation with the new and vibrant, it’s that when Obama talks of bridging divides, people of my age (33) and younger believe it is realistically achievable because the newer generations are not as intransigently partisan as are the baby boomers. Just as Obama’s bi-racial identity is a much more common experience in my generation, Obama’s inclination to be less rigid is more common to those of us who’ve grown up in (and grown weary with) the polarized glare of our parents’ ideologies.

Sure, you have deeply divisive younger people like thirty-something Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos whose obdurate and blindly loyal liberalism makes your average New York City baby boomer look positively bipartisan, but my experience leads me to believe, on the whole, us Gen Xers and Yers are less committed to defending ideology to the death and more interested in ending or at least assuaging the political bitterness. Maybe that’s just my specific cohort, but I think it may play into Obama’s ability to get his message across to younger voters. It may also be why, on the Republican side, John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul captured the youth vote in the earlier contests, with all three offering messages significantly removed from the George W. Bush style of polarizing politics (represented this election by angry-pundit backed and youth-vote loser Mitt Romney).

It’s a decent theory – too critical of baby boomers and too complimentary of my generation for sure – but it’s worth thinking about and is far less derogatory than the going theory that younger voters are just naïve hope-addicts.

MoveOn Ad Not Worthy of Attention

Maybe it’s because I’m removed from the blogosphere these days, but I’m just completely without emotion on MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad. I don’t care about it and I don’t care about the move to condemn it.

My reaction is, so what? A group well known for stirring up ant piles uses a ridiculously hyperbolic play on words to make a point and that’s somehow worthy of Senate action? Or a Presidential comment? It’s hardly worth a mention.

This, I think, is all about the blogofication of political dialogue (or maybe political monologue since people really aren’t talking WITH each other). Political blogs need daily fodder for comment and, in many cases, outrage. When no substantial news exists, non-issues become inflated and everyone is happy because they have something about which to get indignant.

I know the pattern well. When I’m in full-on blogger mode, I can write blowhard commentary with the best of them. But when I’m removed from this world, stories like the MoveOn ad seem incredibly pointless. The President looks silly commenting on it. Congress looks ridiculous passing a resolution on it. The news media looks childish reporting on it. And I probably look hypocritical for getting sucked into the mess.

But I’m just left wondering – where in the world will we summon up the outrage and courage of conviction necessary to address the real issues when we burn so much emotional fuel on such nonsense? Seems to me we waste a lot of energy on hollow topics.

We're All Responsible for Failures in Iraq

So, it’s been four years. And things haven’t exactly gone well.

God knows there have been plenty of failures. The military was not remotely ready for post-invasion peace keeping. The Bush administration did an astoundingly poor job of preparing the American public for the long-term commitments of war. The pro-war forces created unforgivable divisiveness, going out of their way to demean and alienate those citizens who were not so gung-ho. The anti-war forces too-often confused their hatred of Bush with a desire to see the nation fail. The media – well, those failures are too numerous to document.

Yet, in moments like this, we are prone to place the vast majority of the blame on our elected leadership. So this war is, in many people’s minds, Bush’s great blunder. But such analysis is misleading. For all their power, Bush and our others leaders are just representatives of the people. They are us. Yes, blame should fall in heavy heaps around Bush and his administration, but if we fail in Iraq, we are all to blame – those who supported this war and those who didn’t.

Why? Because we forgot one of the most important lessons of American history: divided we fall. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we let ourselves believe we are two peoples with irreconcilable differences. When we treat our fellow countrymen as enemies, what hope do we have of combating the real threats of the world?

I firmly believe that, regardless of the decisions made by our elected leaders, we’d be in a much better situation right now if, once we went to war, we committed ourselves as a nation to winning that war. That means allowing vociferous dissent and not labeling such disagreements as unpatriotic. That means supporting not just the wellbeing of the troops but actually supporting the mission we’ve sent the troops to do. That means unity of purpose even as we welcome differences on strategy.

If I sound like a scold, I don’t mean to be. I’m just tired of the blame being focused completely on the government or, conversely, the leftwing. We can’t shrug of our own culpability in our nation’s failures.

We stop living in a democracy the exact moment we stop believing in our own civic responsibilities.

We have not lost in Iraq yet. There is still a chance to secure some form of victory, even if that victory is not the robust democracy of neo-con dreams. Instead of trying to guarantee failure with an arbitrary timeline for withdrawal, can’t we at least attempt to save the Iraqis from the chaos we unleashed? Can’t those who think the war was a disaster of an idea and those who think the war was a noble and essential undertaking come together and agree that, whatever our other differences, we Americans don’t just start a fire and leave it to burn uncontrollably?

I probably hope for too much. But I have to hope for something.

Another Case of Award Show Politics

I stopped taking most entertainment awards seriously years ago when I figured out that winners and losers are based more on industry politics than actual talent. Well, now it seems that “industry politics” includes national politics as the phenomenally talented Dixie Chicks did not receive a single nomination for this year’s Academy of Country Music awards.

We know why, right? Because the Dixie Chicks have the audacity to be liberal and even insulted the President when lead-singer Natalie Maines said the band is embarrassed that Bush is from Texas. As insults go, that’s hardly even a poke. But the country music world exploded with the kind of rabid anger best reserved for our enemies, not three women with twangs in their voices.

And yet, The Chicks are still being punished, proving that the ACM awards are illegitimate measures of talent.

Of course, that other Academy (the one of Motion Pictures and Sciences) is not exactly innocent of placing politics before talent. After all, does anyone really believe that a PowerPoint presentation about global warming was the year’s best documentary? However noble one thinks Al Gore’s crusade is, the ex-Vice President’s Oscar win is an insult to the hardworking documentary filmmakers who struggled to create gripping nonfiction features this year.

The liberal agenda of the Academy Awards voters even catapulted Melissa Etheridge’s clunky song from An Inconvenient Truth to an Oscar, thus denying any of the far-superior Dreamgirls’ songs a rightful place at the podium. Even Randy Newman's song from Cars would have been more deserving.

Not that any of this really matters. Entertainment awards are undeniably pointless. But I can’t help but see this as just another sign that we as a nation are losing the ability to rationally separate our politics from our personal opinions of one another. We would do better not to be so shallow.