Obama Mania Sweeps Europe

Today's Financial News - Posted February 25, 2008

"There has been an extraordinary shift in the age group that dominates political life, in Europe as well as in the United States." — Lord Rees-Mogg

by Lord Rees-Mogg, Whiskey & Gunpowder

Baltimore – (TFN): I think that Europe is about to suffer an outbreak of Obama mania, just as we caught the epidemic of Kennedy mania in 1961, when Camelot and the young president seized everyone’s imagination. All European countries wanted to have their own Kennedys, and aged politicians fluttered their rheumy eyelids at their electorates, pretending to be young senators from Massachusetts, fresh from Harvard Yard.

There has been an extraordinary shift in the age group that dominates political life, in Europe as well as in the United States. Those of us who are older than the baby boomers saw them take over from our generation, and we now see our children’s generation taking over from them. Technically, I think that Barack Obama is himself a baby boom child, if one extends the birth dates of the baby boom generation from 1947-1965, but he relates to the generation born from 1965-1990. To it, Hillary Clinton, aged 60, seems to be on the cusp between the middle-aged and the elderly. Every time she refers to her greater experience, she reminds the generation now in its 30s that she belongs to an earlier generation.

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My generation, now in our 70s, is the one to which Sen. John McCain belongs. We find it easy to empathise with him. We were at school during World War II, lived our adult lives under the threat of the Cold War, and were contemporary with the Vietnam War, whether we were involved in it or not. It affected the lives and the political attitudes of most American students. It had less of an impact on European students, but still enough to cause the events of 1968 in Paris. To us, the student experience of Bill Clinton himself is still a contemporary event. For the post-baby boomers, it is quite distant in history.

The trouble with the baby boomers is that they have become too familiar. They have been around too long, and there are too many of them. They are boring to the next generation, who became students in the ‘80s, but they are also boring to the pre-baby boom generation, who were students in the ‘50s. Read on for more.

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