"Isn't it neat having someone of our generation in the White House?" one baby boomer asked another in January 1993. Bill and Hillary Clinton are instantly recognizable as members of the cutting-edge liberal half of the baby boom generation (there's also a quieter, conservative half, as Marilyn Quayle pointed out), the articulate student rebels of the 1960s who became the Watergate Democrats of the 1970s and Reagan critics of the 1980s. Boomer liberals have dominated popular culture since Woodstock, 25 years ago. They have set the terms of public debate even when their side lost elections. They control mainline media -- big newspapers, old TV networks. As the Clintons brought Fleetwood Mac to the White House, boomer liberals were poised to dominate American public life for years.
Not anymore. Both Clintons' poll ratings are sagging, despite the high economy; their legislative program is in deep trouble; Democrats face big losses in November's elections. More important, the Clintons have failed to capture the imagination of the country. More voters are repelled than attracted by them. Far from making the country admire and embrace boomer liberalism, the Clintons are hurting the ideas and movements they are associated with, and threatening the boomer liberals' hold on other parts of society.
Why? Both Clintons embody in exaggerated form the attractive traits of boomer liberals: They are articulate and bright, exuding empathy and interest in moral issues. But at the same time, they also symbolize the unattractive boomer liberal traits: self-righteousness and selfishness (the rhetorical condemnations of greed and the real-life commodities trading), self-indulgence (Clinton's profligate appetites) and bossy social engineering (the Clintons' health care plan).
Clinging to the past. Two traits of boomer liberalism especially weaken the president. One is the adolescent tone that is the hallmark of even gray-haired yuppie liberals. These are people who cling to the rock music of their teen years and ooze with nostalgia for their past -- The Big Chill and the Woodstock reunion. Their great moviemakers have made their best films, such as Star Wars and E.T., for children. They still celebrate the days when they defied their elders -- and then wonder why others don't respect their authority. Clinton's transparent lies, his evasions, his whining about how hard he works all sound like a bright but erratic teenager struggling to impress his college counselor, not like a commander-in-chief.
Clinton is also weakened because he has carried the boomer liberal faith of feminism too far. No one minds appointments like those of Donna Shalala as secretary of Health and Human Services or Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. But many are troubled by his ceding the selection of and strategy on his central domestic issue to his wife. The pro-feminist mainline press treated this as a due recognition of her great talents; beyond the beltway it is seen as a payback to the woman who stood by him when Gennifer Flowers accused him of adultery. An active and outspoken spouse can strengthen a president, as Eleanor Roosevelt strengthened FDR. But a spouse who comes forward with a politically indefensible package, stalls all attempts to compromise and repeatedly contradicts and undercuts her husband, as Hillary Rodham Clinton has been doing, makes him appear weak. After Clinton signaled a willingness to compromise on health care, a highly placed Democrat reports, one senator said, "Wait. He hasn't checked with Mama yet." One is reminded what happened nearly 200 years ago in Spain, when King Charles IV appointed his wife's lover, a 25-year-old guardsman, as prime minister. The man turned the country over to Napoleon, at which point Spaniards rebelled, the king was ousted and the country rejected the elitist culture of the court, embracing the demotic, regional arts of flamenco and bullfighting.
The Clintons' unpopularity is now threatening the hold of boomer liberalism on parts of society it has long controlled. Congress has had majorities echoing boomer liberal sentiments for most of the last 20 years; no Reaganish Republicans are on the verge of winning working or actual control of both houses. For the Supreme Court, the Clintons dared not even consider the boomer liberal judicial activists. There are even signs that boomer liberals have lost their hold on popular culture. Prime- time TV, full of programs boomer liberals wanted to see as teenagers, now is cutting back on violence amid prurience and has a few sympathetic characters who are conservative or even religious. This summer's hit movie Forrest Gump portrays the '60s counter-culture as selfish, violent and unhealthy. Country music, produced not in the pro-Clinton centers of Manhattan and Hollywood but in the heartland's Nashville, is surging in popularity: a popular culture explicitly disparaged by Hillary Clinton when she said she was no Tammy Wynette. Boomer liberals, like the Clintons, seem to be losing their hold on America.
