Howard Fineman: Baby Boomers' Last Hurrah
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his campaign-trail theme was the exuberant Fleetwood Mac anthem "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Fourteen years later, that "tomorrow" has arrived for the first baby-boomer president: he turns 60 in August. If he had a song these days, it might be Bob Dylan's wistful hymn "Forever Young." Heart surgery has left Clinton pallid and gaunt, and deepened the hint of melancholy that always lay beneath the surface of his preacherly style. He keeps busy, of course, with charitable work on tsunami and hurricane relief and AIDS in Africa, with global A-list parties and conferences, with kibitzing in back rooms on the nascent presidential candidacy of his wife, Hillary.
And yet, at a recent testimonial dinner for Rep. John Dingell of Michigan—a 79-year-old Democrat who has served for 50 years in Congress—Clinton sounded like he was searching for some new public mission, for some crusade that might be politically useful and personally rejuvenating. Dingell's doggedness was the model. "The secret to living a full life with no regrets and to staying young is to figure out what you believe in and fight for it," Clinton said somberly, biting his lower lip in a trademark display of hard-won understanding. "If you lose, don't give up. If you win, raise the bar, and then rare back and do something else. And remember that, with the accumulation of years, our responsibilities to the future grow greater, not less." The bipartisan audience applauded warmly as he loped off the stage.
As always—and for better or worse—Bill Clinton sums up the political persona and aspirations of his generation: the emotional brew of idealism and self-centeredness; the view of public life as a perpetual "fight" purified to abstraction by the boomers' relative lack of experience on real battlefields, in real wars. And now, as the former president indicated, the leading edge of the baby boom is trying to figure out the politics of the remainder of their lives. "We're facing a kind of final exam," says Nancy Bekavac, a Yale Law School classmate of Clinton's and, since 1990, the president of Scripps College in California. "I'm not sure we really want to take it."...
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And yet, at a recent testimonial dinner for Rep. John Dingell of Michigan—a 79-year-old Democrat who has served for 50 years in Congress—Clinton sounded like he was searching for some new public mission, for some crusade that might be politically useful and personally rejuvenating. Dingell's doggedness was the model. "The secret to living a full life with no regrets and to staying young is to figure out what you believe in and fight for it," Clinton said somberly, biting his lower lip in a trademark display of hard-won understanding. "If you lose, don't give up. If you win, raise the bar, and then rare back and do something else. And remember that, with the accumulation of years, our responsibilities to the future grow greater, not less." The bipartisan audience applauded warmly as he loped off the stage.
As always—and for better or worse—Bill Clinton sums up the political persona and aspirations of his generation: the emotional brew of idealism and self-centeredness; the view of public life as a perpetual "fight" purified to abstraction by the boomers' relative lack of experience on real battlefields, in real wars. And now, as the former president indicated, the leading edge of the baby boom is trying to figure out the politics of the remainder of their lives. "We're facing a kind of final exam," says Nancy Bekavac, a Yale Law School classmate of Clinton's and, since 1990, the president of Scripps College in California. "I'm not sure we really want to take it."...