Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/111692/11169911.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 57

ELECTION `92

A Generation Takes Power


As America's first baby-boomer President, Clinton will bring
to the White House a fresh mental map of historical impressions
and pop-cultural symbols

By WALTER SHAPIRO -- With reporting by Priscilla Painton,
with Clinton


    ". . . 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 . . ."

                    -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961


    These stirring words commemorated the last time that one
generation ceded power to the next. The 22-year age chasm
between President-elect Bill Clinton and George Bush is the
second largest in U.S. electoral history, surpassed only by the
27 years separating Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. But this
generational conceit is unlikely to be updated as a theme for
Clinton's Inaugural Address. Imagine a hapless Clinton
speechwriter struggling to reduce the baby-boomer life
experience to tough-minded Kennedyesque cadences. No way would
the incoming President dare tell the unvarnished generational
truth: "Again, the torch has been passed to a new generation of
Americans, born after World War II, nurtured in prosperity,
aroused by Vietnam, sustained by rock 'n' roll, tested by drugs
and promiscuity, embraced by the media and belatedly betrayed by
the nation's decline in living standards."

    At 46, Clinton will be the third youngest President in
history, out-youthed only by Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. For
40 years, World War II was a dominant life experience for eight
Presidents in a row. All of them served in uniform -- even
Ronald Reagan, who sometimes also projected the fantasy that he
had seen the horrors of combat. Clinton was not born until a
year after Japan surrendered. "World War II is as far away from
Bill Clinton's generation as World War I was for George Bush's
generation," observes Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns
Hopkins University. "What is happening is that the first half
of this century is receding in our institutional memory."

    As the nation's first baby-boomer President, Clinton will
bring to the Oval Office a fresh mental map of generational
impressions. Gone are the Andrews Sisters, Kilroy and the Berlin
blockade. In their place come Father Knows Best, Elvis, 1960s
folk music (Chelsea Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell
song Chelsea Morning), Vietnam protests, the 1972 George
McGovern crusade and Watergate. Despite the politically
exaggerated privation of his childhood, Clinton came of age at
a moment of exceptional national privilege, when a studious
young leader from Hot Springs, Arkansas, could aspire to an
elite educational odyssey that carried him from Georgetown to
Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to Yale Law School. America of
the 1960s worked for Clinton in ways that many children of
today's hard-pressed middle class can scarcely imagine.

    A President, if artful, can transcend mere policy and
become an avatar of an era. What difference will the final
ascension of the baby-boom generation make in terms of the
American spirit, the cultural zeitgeist? The irresistible
Kennedy parallel would suggest that the symbolism of a Clinton
presidency could someday outweigh its concrete accomplishments.
From fashion (a continually bareheaded J.F.K. decapitated the
hat industry) to sports (touch football and 50-mile hikes) to
dallying with movie stars (Marilyn Monroe suggestively cooing
"Happy birthday, Mr. President"), Kennedy defined a style that
was half Harvard and half James Bond. But J.F.K. spoke for a
generation that craved a larger-than-life icon, a President who
legitimized both its bravery in World War II and its
man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit struggles to create the affluent
society.

    Baby boomers lack this palpable hunger for acceptance.
"Unlike the Kennedy era," says Nicholas Lemann, author of The
Promised Land, "Clinton's generation has already had its chance
to make its tastes the country's tastes." Has it ever. Baby
boomers -- especially the older ones like Clinton who were born
in the 1940s -- have been pop-cultural imperialists since before
Woodstock; the rest of America, like it or not, has had to
endure their collective self-absorption as they metamorphosed
from hippies to yuppies to competitive parenting. What is
possibly left for them to gain from a Clinton presidency, other
than perhaps good government? Hard to picture Clinton's peers
celebrating their empowerment with buttons that defiantly
declare DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 50. Or angrily marching on the
White House chanting, "Hey, hey, Billy C., you've got a good
job, how about me?"

    The ascension of Clinton gives older baby boomers a
psychological gift that some of them will be loath to accept --
irrefutable proof that they are mature adults. Like the
Doonesbury character Zonker Harris, baby boomers have been
indulging in the longest adolescence since Archie and Veronica.
True, parenthood has tamed many of their rebellious impulses.
But the full awareness of the fleetingness of youth -- even with
Stairmasters and cosmetic surgery -- was postponed as long as
the World War II generation walked the corridors of power.
"Instead of being able to feel like we're still kids and having
to look up at the generation running things, suddenly there's
a guy your age who is President of the United States," says Paul
Hirsch, a sociologist at Northwestern University. ``This is the
first time that the country has symbolically acknowledged that
we baby boomers have it all figured out."

    Every President ages in office -- and soon baby boomers
will glimpse their own mortality in the new care lines on
Clinton's face, in the slow droop of his jowls and in his
Sisyphean struggles against the thickening of middle life. "I
look at Clinton in his dumpy running shorts," sniffs marketing
consultant Judith Langer. "He symbolizes the baby-boom
generation: they think health, but they don't always resist that
chocolate-chip cookie." In the waning days of the campaign,
Clinton's reading glasses (for baby boomers the scariest word
in the English language is suddenly bifocals) began to make a
frequent appearance on the nightly news. As for the Vice
President-elect, Al Gore, just 19 months Clinton's junior, the
passage of the years will probably be reckoned by the growth of
the small bald spot in his still dark brown hair. For what is
Gore profited, if he shall gain the second highest office in the
land and yet be tempted by Rogaine?

    At a moment when the American libido seems to oscillate
between Puritanism and rampant exhibitionism, how significant
is it that for the first time in more than 30 years the nation
has elected a President with sex appeal? The last six
Presidents -- Bush, Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard
Nixon and Lyndon Johnson -- combined do not conjure up enough
erotic energy to fill a single room at the No-Tell Motel. Forget
Gennifer Flowers -- this is not the moment to descend into the
muck of her sleazy allegations. Rather, the swooning and the
cooing on the rope lines during the last breathless days of the
Clinton campaign were unavoidably reminiscent of Kennedy. In
Louisville, Kentucky, the scene seemed out of Beatlemania. Women
screamed when Clinton reached for their hands as loudspeakers
blared out the Fab Four singing, "When I saw her standing
there." Cheryl Russell, editor of The Boomer Report, a monthly
newsletter on consumer trends, captures a new dimension in the
national psyche when she confides, "Every woman I know is having
sex dreams about Bill Clinton. We're finally getting a President
our own age who we can imagine having sex with. I don't recall
anyone having sex dreams about Michael Dukakis."

    If Reagan was shaped by Hollywood and Bush influenced by
the prep-school verities of his youth, then for Clinton the
seminal moments probably came at Oxford and Yale. He was there
during the early, heady days of one of the most influential
social movements of his lifetime -- the birth of modern
feminism. Hillary is part of that legacy; few men of an older
political generation would feel comfortable with wives who
earned far more than they did. Sometimes lost amid the Hillary
hype is a larger truth: Clinton, like many baby boomers, feels
comfortable around intelligent women. Politics has always been
a locker-room sport, but in the Clinton campaign the role of
women transcended tokenism and approached equal power.

    For all their activism, the Clintons are apt to play a
surprisingly modest role as national tastemakers. They are far
more likely to reflect baby-boomer trends than to shape them.
Sure, there are fearless forecasts from marketing gurus. "Elvis
memorabilia is going to go up to a whole new level," predicts
Brad Edmondson, the editor in chief of American Demographics.
"Remember Ronald Reagan and jelly beans. Jimmy Carter and
peanuts." He may be right; too bad Graceland (privately owned)
is not traded on the stock exchange.

    Beyond Elvis and the saxophone, Clinton's musical taste is
broad but bland. Early in the campaign, he sat down with Rolling
Stone for a lengthy interview about pop music. Among his
favorites: Judy Collins, Dolly Parton, Michael Bolton, Otis
Redding, Ray Charles, Harry Belafonte, the Temptations, the
Beatles and Stan Getz. Nothing, in short, that cannot be easily
found in a prominent place in any shopping-mall music store in
America. This middle-of-the-road eclecticism is typical of
Clinton's generation, lost in the rock-is-dead wilderness,
casting about for a musical resting place between rap and heavy
metal. If the President-elect has an unorthodox musical passion,
it lies in his deep appreciation for black gospel and rhythm and
blues. Unlike almost all white politicians of any generation,
Clinton gets the beat consistently right.

    Moreover, he understands the potency of pop-culture icons.
In Chicago last month, Clinton discovered he was staying in the
same hotel as the band U2. Taking advantage of his own
celebrity, the candidate went up to the band's suite and hung
out for a while, finding a common ground in swapping stories
about life on the road. Afterward he dragged the band along in
his motorcade to a Chicago Bears game. A pro football game and
U2 -- that pretty well sums up culture in the age of Clinton.

    When it comes to fashion, both Clintons might best be
described as conscientious objectors. "I don't think he even
knows who Armani is," marvels an aide somewhat hyperbolically.
Clinton's suits are still bought off the rack from Dillard's,
a down-home Little Rock department store. In his casual wear,
Clinton favors jeans and khakis, not even bothering to follow
his generation in its mid-life enthusiasm for the Gap and Banana
Republic. The President-elect's constant battles with his weight
might influence fashion were not Levi's already hitting it big
with Dockers, which are cut with a baby boomer's sagging
physique in mind. "Bill Clinton is half hip and half hick,"
explains Steve Rabinowitz, one of the traveling staff members
on the campaign plane. "You want to write about the hip part,
but sometimes the hick part gets in the way."

    If nesting were not already a certified baby-boomer trend,
President Clinton might get the credit for popularizing it.
"This will be a very family-oriented Administration," predicts
Derek Shearer, a longtime Clinton friend and economic adviser.
"You'll see a lot of couples with kids at the White House."
Equally visible will be the lights burning long after midnight
in the White House family quarters; Clinton's idea of a good
time is staying up late playing hearts with friends or
discussing Hawaii's health-care system. A valid test for the
limits of presidential leadership by example will be whether the
nation begins to emulate Clinton's nocturnal body clock. Aides
joke that Clinton runs on "Elvis standard time," valiantly
struggling to avoid any event that requires his presence before
9 a.m. Never will power breakfasts have such a militant foe in
the Oval Office.

    A few weeks ago, on his campaign plane, Clinton allowed
himself a moment of introspection about what his election would
mean to a generation whose first political act was both
protesting -- and serving in -- an unpopular war. "If I win,"
he said softly, "it will finally close the book on Vietnam."
Whether marching in the streets or marching in uniform, Vietnam
introduced baby boomers to the sober realities of power. Another
generation chose Vietnam as a battleground, but in very personal
terms Clinton and his peers had to face the consequences of that
decision. Now a child of postwar prosperity has ascended to the
presidency. How both Bill Clinton and his generation adjust to
their newfound power will determine the fate not only of the
baby boomers but of the nation itself.