Gender, race, age. In all the fuss this week about defining differences between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton as frontrunners in the Democratic presidential primary, age has got lost in the mix.
Age is a sleeper issue in the campaign, but it might get a wake-up call.
A woman of 60 is running against a man not even old enough to remember the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy died in 1963. They are on different generational sides of that river of remembrance, a profound marker for shaping political identity and public service.
Obama is 46, and so am I. Those of us born in 1961 see our generation represented on the platform of American presidential history for the first time. Obama sends out a lighthouse signal in the dark that his -- and our -- hour in the nation's story may soon come.
Yet in 2008, is the republic ready to let the word go forth, as JFK declared in 1961, "that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"? And are we ready to take it? If Clinton wins and serves out her term, it will be 20 consecutive years that a member of the Baby Boom generation occupies the Oval Office.
Contrast Obama's sleek suits and smooth demeanor with the white-haired warrior Sen. John McCain, a Republican with rare exuberance in his early 70s. If McCain was elected, he'd represent the fine American generation skipped over when George Bush, a World War II-vintage hero, was succeeded by a much younger man, Bill Clinton, in 1993. Obama and McCain may both battle against the powerful demographics of the Baby Boomers.
As for us, my forty-something friends and I are talking about the historic choice before us. Frankly, we're a bit skeptical about this date with destiny even as we like the look and sound of this lanky lawyer from the land of Lincoln.
"Obama is so cool, he seems like JFK, someone you'd like to go drinking with," said an old friend from Swarthmore, our alma mater, who now works on Wall Street. He said the sheer impact of an American president born of a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father would do wonders to restore our international image.
But it's not a done deal for him. On readiness and substance, he leans toward Clinton, even if her personality is a "downer."
A doctor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who went to Amherst College said much the same thing about Obama's appeal. "I'm much more excited by Obama... and his years as a community organizer," Michele Heisler said. She expressed qualms about Clinton's vicarious power through her husband's offices as governor and president. "I think our generation of women is turned off by the dynastic quality of her candidacy," she said.
Fourteen years in the arc of our America changed everything, from 1961 to 1975. Along the way of our youth, we were overshadowed by the loud rock and roll generation that caused commotions everywhere from San Francisco to Chicago to Woodstock. All we had to look forward to was Watergate, which shattered our political innocence when we were young. (Thanks for that, Richard M. Nixon.)
Clinton was constantly in the vanguard of her generation's fits, starts, rebellions and progress. When they met at Yale Law School, Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were classic "children of the '60s," indelibly imprinted by the anti-war movement , the civil rights movement and the eventful decade when they came of age. Some think it would be good to have a president who was free of all that angst and turmoil 40 years past.
What you need to know about Obama and the rest of us is that we were literally children in the '60s. If we wept when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were slain in April and June 1968, it was without knowing why the world felt like it was tearing apart. Many of us remember the war in Vietnam as something the adults talked about all the time, We saw the war on black and white television with Walter Cronkite staying calm through the surreal scenes. In a child's mind, a trip to outer space to see the moon seemed like (at last) a good story with a happy ending.
It's true, nobody ever accused us of being the greatest generation. Obama is one of the best and brightest, sure, but we've largely taken the pursuit of happiness to mean domestic, recreational or personal pleasures. In other words, we've never taken to the public square as a generation to rally around or cause social change. It's not clear Obama can count on us, his peers, because of a lack of political cohesion.
Actress Lauren Madigan, also 46, said of Obama: "He had me at hello." For thousands, it was a case of political love at first sight during his inspired speech at the Democratic convention in 2004.
Then Madigan, a Baltimore mother, suggested a Solomonic solution to the generational dilemma. "I believe he will be a great president someday," she said.
"But Hillary has this one and only shot. If she doesn't get the nomination, we may not see a woman president for another 20 years," Madigan said. "All things being equal, that's a very good reason to vote for her."
Clinton doesn't dare say a word about Obama's age, by the way. Funny thing is, her husband was elected president of the United States at age 46.
Jamie Stiehm is a writer based in Baltimore.