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With Obama, many say bye-bye to boomers
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Wide-eyed or tie-dyed, Obama will be sworn in by an early "Joneser" himself — Chief Justice John Roberts, who turns 54 at the end of January. And while the average age of the new Congress is 58.2 — an early boomer group — the new president is bringing some "Jonesers" with him.
Obama's chosen treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is 47. His pick for education secretary, Arne Duncan, is 44, as is Susan Rice, his U.N. ambassador. (His apparent pick for surgeon general, 39-year-old neurosurgeon and TV correspondent Sanjay Gupta, is a true Gen Xer.)
Of course, Obama's also bringing in veteran Clintonites — most notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, 61, his former campaign rival, as secretary of state. And his vice president, Joe Biden, 66, and defense secretary, Bush holdover Robert Gates, 65, are pre-boomers. But those are the kind of choices — inclusive of other perspectives, embracing rivals — that lead many to call Obama the first post-boomer president.
"It may be technically correct to call him a boomer," says Douglas Warshaw, a New York media executive who, at age 49, is part of whatever cohort Obama is in. "And it's in the Zeitgeist to call him a Gen Xer. But I think he's more like a generational bridge." He adds that Obama got where he was by "brilliantly leveraging the communication behaviors of post-Boomers," with a campaign waged across the Web, on cell phones and on social networking sites.
One analyst of popular culture believes Obama definitely symbolizes a new generation — just not one connected to the year he was born.
"I think it's hilarious that everyone wants to categorize people by their birth year, especially now, a time when our parents are on Facebook," says Montana Miller of Bowling Green State University. Obama, she says, represents a generational shift in ways less tangible than age.
"You can see it from his approach to knowledge. Never before have we had a president who's troubled about giving up his Blackberry," Miller says. (Indeed, Obama is still in a struggle over whether he can keep the device.) "He's constantly exposed to multiple perspectives, to what people out there feel and think."
Obama's biracial heritage also plays into the generational shift, Miller says. "It's so emblematic of how the world is changing," she says. "So many people are now some sort of complicated ethnic mix. Today's youth are completely comfortable with that."
‘A rock star’
Will Obama speak of generational change when he stands on the podium to issue his inaugural address? Given some of his rhetoric on the campaign trail, it's reasonable to think he will — just as, some six months before he was born, JFK pronounced on Inauguration Day that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace."
Interestingly, Kennedy is often claimed by boomers to be one of their own, even though he was nothing of the kind; born in 1917, he'd be 91 now. In the same way, many Gen Xers and even Gen Yers like to claim Obama, too.
"As humans we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, part of a page in a history book," Pontell says. And at least for now, he adds, "Obama's a rock star, and people are dying to call him one of their own."
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